Table of Contents:

• How To Identify Diversity In Ourselves
• How To Find Our Core Gift
• Two Solutions: Internal And External

Try This When It’s Too Hard To Love

There are times that all of us feel like we’re just too broken or too strange or different or wounded to be able to love successfully. In this episode, I’m going to share truly life-changing tools to help you discover the gift that lies at the heart of that wounding, so that you can find the self-love you need to be able to authentically connect again. Stay tuned to this episode of the Deeper Dating® Podcast. — Hello and welcome to the Deeper Dating® Podcast. I’m Ken Page and I’m a psychotherapist. I’m the author of the best-selling book Deeper Dating® and the Cofounder of DeeperDating®.com, an environment where single people can meet online in a way that’s kind, respectful, fun and inspiring. In every episode, I’m going to share with you the greatest tools I know to help you find love and keep it flourishing, and heal your life in the process, because the skills of dating are nothing more than the real skills of love, which are the greatest skills of all for a happy life. If you want to learn more about Deeper Dating®, just go to DeeperDatingPodcast.com, and you can sign up for my mailing list and get free gifts and learn so much more about how to use these ideas to transform your own intimacy journey. Today’s episode is going to be a little bit different. It’s part of a podcast tour called “How to Actually Feel Worthy in Love“. I was really honored when Veronica Grant, my friend, asked me to be a part of it. Here’s what’s going to happen. During this tour, every day for two weeks, the tour is going to feature an episode from a variety of podcasts on how to feel worthy in love. Yesterday, October 7th episode was Madeline Charles‘ podcast, and the next episode on October 11th is over in Kira Sabin’s The League of Adventurous Singles podcast, and today it’s me. If you want to register for the entire tour and just get wonderful kind of new insights, just go to VeronicaGrant.com/podtour. By the way, if you like what you’re learning here, it would be a wonderful thank you to subscribe and to leave me a review. Thank you so much for that, and enjoy this episode. — In my work and in my life, I’ve really come to believe that maybe one of the absolute greatest stuck points in our ability to love doesn’t come from our inability to love. It comes from shame around the particular, unique, diverse ways that we love, and then when that shame comes, we block intimacy. We get this messaging that this is what love is supposed to look like, and really for all of us like love and sex look different than that. They look unique. They touch the deepest aspects of our being, and the deepest aspects of our being are different, are brilliant, are unfathomable, are mysterious, are edgy, are quiet, all of these different things that don’t exactly fit into the paradigm. What happens is when we have this kind of intimacy diversity, kind of like neurodiversity or gender diversity. When we learn to honor and listen to our intimacy diversity, our lives start working, and amazing things happen.CLICK TO TWEETWhen we’ve got our own intimacy diversity like the ways that we respond to love, the ways that we love, the ways that we show love, the ways that we get frightened from love, when we don’t accept those ways, we go into a lockdown. Our being locks up like a bicycle where the chain kind of locks and everything stops. That’s what happens inside of us when we can’t name and honor our intimacy diversity. Here’s the fabulous news around that, and it’s what we’re going to all work on today in this episode. When we learn to honor those parts of ourselves that feel different or strange, or don’t love in normal ways, or have sex in normal ways or relate in “normal ways.” When we learn to honor and listen to those parts, our lives start working. Amazing things happen. The choices that we make in love shift. There’s a dignifying of self, a sense of freedom, and kind of like a sense of joining the full human race because, oh yeah, I am someone who can love. I just love in these different ways. Those different ways are the key to us being able to love in the world. This is a concept that is fascinating and amazing, and really revolutionary. Here’s what it is. Beneath every one of the places where we feel like we’re not ready for love or capable of love, lies a Core Gift. Meaning one of the deepest capacities and gifts of our being. It’s just one we have not learned to listen to yet. Identifying it will make all the difference in the world. I know for me that one of the most painful, existentially painful experiences, that I’ve had in my life is this feeling of like, “What is wrong with me that I can’t love?” That I shut people out, that my sexuality is different, that my sexual response is different, that my emotional responses are different, and then I just shut down. I lock up and I don’t want to be there, and that means I can’t love. That lock-up was one of the most painful parts of my life, and then that understanding that there was a part of me that was made mute, that wasn’t allowed to speak, and when it was allowed to speak and when I could listen and when in the relationship I could share what it was that I needed, what it was that this part of me was afraid of or desirous of, or the pacing that I needed, or the connection or the holding that I needed.

How To Identify Diversity In Ourselves

When I could do that, it was like liberation. It was like the same liberation as coming out as gay. It was the same liberation, “Oh my God, I could be a part of this world and I can love,” and then the walls begin to come down. How do we identify these parts of ourselves? We’re going to start with looking at the ways that we feel that we’re not capable of love or not ready for love, or we block love consistently, or we just go numb or shut down or stop feeling, whatever the things are that we have. You could even just take a minute now to think about this. The ways that you feel like, “I just don’t cut it when it comes to love, or I’m too different, or this part of me is too strange.” Essentially, these are places where we either feel like we’re too much or that we’re not enough, and there’s a shame and a feeling that we won’t be loved because we’re either too much or not enough.

  We’ll talk in much more detail about what those are, and I’ll help you identify those spots for you, but I just want to say that what I have come to see in my years as a therapist is that the opposite is true. That what keeps us from loving and being loved is the shame around those parts of ourselves. It is not those parts of ourselves, because when we are ashamed of those parts of ourselves, we never learn how to work with them, and we never discover the genius in them, and the gift in them. Just some examples of too much, feeling like too much and too little. Some feelings of too much are, and see which ones ring true for you. I know so many of them have rung true for me and do ring true for me. One is “I need too much”. If I really really enter into deep love, I get so needy that it’s kind of just like the Grand Canyon, and no one is going to be able to bear all of that need. Another is “my emotions are too intense, my joy is really intense, my anger is really intense, my sadness is really intense”, and people just feel like I’m too much. Another is “my sexuality is so intense that it might scare people off”, or it’s so kinky that it might scare people off, or it’s so fierce that it just scares me. My need for love and connection is so fierce that it scares me. My need and my caring about truth is so intense that I have upset people my entire life because I speak the truth and I get in trouble, or I ask people to really speak the truth and they can’t do it, and they end up gaslighting me and making me feel ashamed, or I have a lot of sense of personal power, and I scare people with that. I feel like a big, big, big, big, big one I think for women is the feeling like that too-muchness is going to make me not feminine enough, and then I’ll never be able to find an alpha male, and that I’m somehow like going against the natural order of things. That’s a scary and sad thing for powerful women to feel. Now, just a little break here to say something about that. I deeply believe that all of us need to be able to be vulnerable and not hide behind a mask of toughness or strength, but hey folks, that’s the men too. Women are not more responsible for that task than men are. I deeply believe that each of these qualities that I described definitely has stuck points, has immaturity, has reactiveness, etc., because we’re human and because our biggest insecurities constellate around our deepest places of charge, and our Core Gifts are where we are the most deeply charged. Of course, we’re going to kind of get excessive around these parts of us. Of course, there’s a journey to learn, to take that fierce, raw energy and work with it in wise ways, but that doesn’t make the raw energy any less precious and central to our being. It’s not something we can deny because it scares us. It’s not something we could deny because it’s gotten us in trouble. It’s not even something we can deny because we’ve screwed up around it. These are our Core Gifts, and they’re like the very core of the mechanism of our being. We need to find the gift underneath and behind our behaviors.CLICK TO TWEETOther side to this is the feeling of I’m not enough. Not that I’m too much but in fact, I’m not enough. “I’m not strong enough. I don’t stand up for myself enough. I’m not ambitious enough. I’m not aggressive enough. I’m not intense enough in sex. I get steamrolled by people. I lose myself. There’s a quietness or a shyness or an introversion in myself that feels like a flaw or a problem, or I find myself going numb or shutting down, and then feeling like I have nothing to give, and that just makes me want to run because I feel like it’s so unfair to the other person, and it’s so kind of upsetting to see and to do, or a kind of like aversion to making waves or making too much of ourselves.” A fear of expressing our needs. A fear of expressing when something doesn’t feel right to us, and then this kind of attendant feeling of being weak, not strong enough. These are all the kind of environments of not enough. These are all the kind of things we feel around the Core Gifts of gentleness, tenderness, humility and graciousness, and quiet in a world that doesn’t honor those qualities. Before moving on, I just also want to acknowledge that there are character disorders. There is mental illness. There is addiction. There are traits and attributes that make us kind of really veer off into zones that are very problematic for us and for other people. I want to acknowledge that kind of those pathological situations might not exactly be what I’m talking about here. Although, I would say that even in those situations, we still need to find the gift underneath and behind our behaviors.

How To Find Our Core Gift

How do we do this? How do we go from the place that we’re ashamed of? The ways in which we are kind of intimacy divergent, or we feel not enough, or we feel like too much in the realm of intimacy. How do we take that and find the Core Gift in those places where we have been ashamed, and we feel like we don’t love right, or that we are not right? How do we find the Core Gift? This is a kind of rich and complex process and, you know, I spend huge amounts of time in my intensives and in my book and my course, teaching how people can identify their Core Gifts, but there are some simple things that I can say about that, that I think really help.

  Here’s what happens, I think. We feel and experience a part of ourselves, and then we feel ashamed, and we tell ourselves, “This is never going to work in the realm of love. I won’t be able to find anybody that can accept this, or it’ll be too difficult,” or whatever. We just feel shame around this aspect of our being. Our task is to find the Core Gift inherent in that part of us because it is not just a pathology. There is a part of our being that is essential and true and deep that doesn’t know how to speak in an adult way yet, about who it is and what it longs for and what it needs, and our job is to find that out. Again, in my work, that’s something I teach, and it’s a structured process to do. Like to keep it really simple, to notice in your interactions with the world when you feel numb, when you feel hurt, when you feel joy, when you feel connectedness, and ask yourself this question. What is this saying about my being that this is hurting me? What is this saying about what matters to me that this is hurting me? What is this hurt asking for? What created this sadness, or what’s this exuberance? What’s this joy? What’s this peace? What’s this happiness that I’m feeling in connection with what happened just now in this interaction? We dishonor the negative things we tell ourselves, “Get over it, we’re being too sensitive.” The positive things, we don’t kind of deeply enough treasure the beauty of our capacity to have joy and connectedness, and understand what it was in that situation that allowed our hearts to be open like that. These are the keys to understanding our intimacy diversity and being able to honor it. The key is to find out why does it make sense that I feel this way? Given who I am, why does it make sense that I feel this sadness? Why does it make sense that I feel this anger? Why does it make sense that I feel this joy? Why might it make sense that I feel numb now? We start out by listening to and honoring that part, and then the next question is, what does this part of me need? I’ll never forget that I was in a workshop. I’ll never forget this glorious exercise that the playwright, David Schechter, created, where you had to find the part of you that felt like it couldn’t love, and you had to embody that part of you, and then there would be a group of people. It was a psychodrama exercise around you. From this place where you felt like you couldn’t love, you would tell them what you need from them, and words would come out. That would be about how much distance I needed, but not too much distance. The tender space that I was in, how I needed to feel held and seen but not engulfed, not demanded of, certainly not criticized. I never knew there were words for what I wanted. I just thought I was screwed up. I just thought I was numb or blank or couldn’t love. The experience of putting words on the needs that we feel at those times is just huge, and I would not be in a relationship today if I couldn’t do that, because I am so intimacy divergent in so many beautiful and amazing ways that luckily, I’m able to say strange, strange things to my husband and ask for things I need, like maybe asking for complete quiet because I’ve lost myself and I need to come back to myself, or maybe being held in a certain way, or maybe being able to talk about something or have him talk about something. Find a person who is a treasure and who treasures you.CLICK TO TWEETThings that in the past I would have just thought, “Oh my God, these are too annoying. These are too weird,” but I found a person who is a treasure and treasures, and usually, essentially, makes space for these parts of me. But the learning and the liberation for me was in finding out, how does it make sense that I’m feeling this way and what would I optimally want and need? I might not get it, but what I’m doing is honoring and enlivening and allowing a deeply unique part in me, and those parts in me, which are often related to pulling back from love for me, are some of my greatest treasures, because when I pull back, and there’s space for me to pull back, the next wave of love comes strongly, but then I need to retreat again. These are kind of things that Elaine Aron talks about for HSPs, Highly Sensitive People, but the discovery that this did not mean that I was incapable of love, that the language of my love came out in these particular ways was such a liberating gift. Now I can be in relationships and honor these parts of me to a very large degree, not enough, and there are definitely places I still feel shame, and in those places, I get prickly in lots of different ways, but this is a key thing, is to actually name the gift and when you know how it makes sense that you’re feeling the strange way that you’re feeling at the moment. I remember hearing Janeane Garofalo. She’s doing a comedy routine, and she just came out with this thing. She said, “Were you ever like in the middle of sex and you just wanted to like reach out and punch the guy in the face and say, ‘Stop fucking me?’” What my guess is that like if she felt that way, she probably felt like, “What is wrong with me that I can’t even enjoy sex, and this like huge dose of aggression comes up?” We can be pretty sure that what was going on in most cases, maybe it was PTSD, but in most cases, what it was is that there was a part of her talking inside her about the kind of sex that she wanted, and it wasn’t happening, and she couldn’t put words on it. All of a sudden, she wanted to punch the guy in the face. I think this is like a very kind of rich story that really captures something.

Two Solutions: Internal And External

The solution is twofold, and this is like what I really believe. I believe that there are two things that we can do. Two very clear things, one is internal and one is external, to help us find these parts of ourselves, learn to treasure them, find their magic and find their genius and find their potential and find their beauty, and then be able to stand behind them, and be intimate in a way that makes room for them, because when we don’t do that, we create walls. We shut out love because our psyche, our deep psyche knows that we will not be able to protect those parts of ourselves because we’re ashamed of them. We’ll try to override them or suppress them, and when our deep psyche knows that, it says, “I’m going to keep you out of a good relationship because that could be devastating. If you can’t take care of me like that, it could go really bad,” so then we choose unavailable people, or we stay solo or single or both. The first task is to find the beauty in our intimacy diversity. To find the worth and the value in the places we feel not enough, to find the tenderness, the desire for peace, the desire for people to be happy and comfortable, a quietness of spirit, a deep internalized aspect of our being that goes really far and really deep in, not just out, and for qualities of kind of intensity; our passion, our ferocity, our ambition, our aliveness, our desire to eat the world, our desire to be real, our desire to grapple with and wrestle with and live in connection and context.

  These are parts that it’s really simple, and in a way, as a gay man, I think that this is a metaphor like I could have years ago, gone on and on and on. I mean, these were the old days when like most of the literature told me that I was sick, and I remember, you know, day after day sitting in the library on the floor going, “Oh no, oh boy, this is really bad.” At a certain point, I had to make a decision, and the decision was I was going to embrace how I loved, or I was going to go with all these things about how it was obviously screwed up, and it was an existential choice, and one would have led to constant and terrible convolutions of isolation and pain and suffering and shame, and one would have led to my having a life, and that was the path that I chose, and it’s a similar kind of coming out metaphor for each of us. With the ways that we love, the pacing that we want love to happen in, the moments of quietness, the moments of power. I think that the shame around our diversity and the uniqueness of our expression is the greatest, greatest block to love that exists. The other way, there’s the work of honoring and naming, that’s the internal work. The other work is finding those precious people who can see those exact parts of you that we’re talking about, and make space for them, and hold them like they’re valuable. Hold them like they’re sacred. Not necessarily understand them fully, but love them or get a kick out of them, and protect them and make those parts of us essentially feel safe because of who they are. Without those two things, the honoring from the inside and the honoring from the outside, it’s too hard to really kind of like for most of us to feel like we can be part of the world as we are, and really kind of be the full expression of ourselves. Those are the two things that are needed. The people outside who honor, and this is why I always say that the main question in our search for love, the first question needs to be, “Does my soul feel safe with this person?” The same is true with friendship, and until we have people that can honor these parts of ourselves, and enjoy them, and appreciate them that we felt were like just too damn quirky or weird or strange or different or incapable or too much or not enough, until we find those people, it’s going to be almost too hard to be able to find our place in the world. I just want to support each of us in our journey to embrace our intimacy diversity, and put names on these parts that are names that are not shaming, but names that honor the bigness, the tenderness, the sensitivity, the uniqueness, the preciousness of the way that we respond, and what we need in love. Thank you for listening to this episode, and thank you for also being a part of the How To Actually Feel Worthy In Love Podcast Tour. If you want to listen to the rest of the podcasts in this tour, you can sign up at VeronicaGrant.com/podtour. I look forward to seeing you at DeeperDatingPodcast.com for transcripts, more episodes, and free gifts. Thanks so much for joining me. Also, I’d love to hear your responses to these ideas. Thanks so much, and see you in the next episode.

Important Links:

• Deeper Dating®
• DeeperDating®.com
• DeeperDatingPodcast.com
• Veronica Grant
• Madeline Charles
• VeronicaGrant.com/podtour
• David Schechter
• Elaine Aron
• Janeane Garofalo

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Table of Contents:

• First Question
• Look For Your Attractions
• Take Time

How To Rewire Your Attractions To Find Real And Healthy Love

The 3 Keys To Transforming Your Dating Life – And Your Future

There are three skills that you can use to rewire your romantic and sexual attractions to be able to find and keep healthy love. Stay tuned to this episode of the Deeper Dating® Podcast as I teach you each one of these research-backed skills. — Hello and welcome to the Deeper Dating® Podcast. I’m Ken Page. I’m a psychotherapist. I’m the author of Deeper Dating® and the Cofounder of DeeperDating®.com, a site where single people can meet in an online environment that’s kind, respectful, fun and inspiring. Every episode, I’m going to teach you the greatest tools that I know to help you find love and keep it flourishing and heal your life in the process, because the real skills of dating are nothing more than the real skills of love. Those are the greatest skills of all for a happy life. If you want to learn more about the Deeper Dating® approach, just go to DeeperDatingPodcast.com. If you sign up for my mailing list, you’ll get free gifts, a free eBook, and you’ll learn more about how to use these ideas to transform your own intimacy journey, and you’ll find a complete transcript of every episode. I also want to say that you can find me on Instagram @Deeper.Dating, and I’ve been offering a lot of very short videos there that I hope are helpful as well. I also want to say that everything I share in this podcast is educational in nature, and it’s not medical or psychiatric advice or treatment. If you like what you’re learning here, I’d love it if you could subscribe and leave me a review, so thank you so much for that. — I’m really excited to jump into this now. I’ve been thinking so much about this issue of kind of rewiring our attractions. It’s an exquisitely intense, difficult, important process, and we are not given the tools to do that deep rewiring, but it makes all the difference in the world for those of us like me, and like many people I work with, whose wiring was not kind of set up to quickly and easily lead us to healthy love. I’m going to talk about three things that not only help you rewire in powerful ways and change your future, but heal your life in the process. I think it’s an amazingly positive thing, but it’s what they call a hard work miracle. Develop a new taste for a loving relationship that’s good and healthy for you.CLICK TO TWEETI think Thomas Edison said that most of us don’t realize the key to success because it’s dressed in overalls and it looks like work. I love that quote, and this is work, but it’s nice work. It’s good work if you can get it. It’s the most beautiful work that there is, I think, for all of us who are really trying to bring evolution and mindfulness into our search for love, and are building a family in the world. I want to talk about these three steps that make such a powerful difference, that in my very long time as a therapist and a coach, and as a seeker and a student of intimacy, I’ve seen again and again are a very simple and direct and powerful path to what we’re looking for.

 

First Question

Let me start upfront by saying what these three steps are. The first one is this question that could, and should, shape your entire search for love from now on, “Does my soul feel safe with this person?” Yes, there are a lot of other questions that need to be answered too, but this is the number one question. The second is to look for your attractions of inspiration and avoid your attractions of deprivation, and even make a pledge to do that. We’re going to do that in this episode. Each of you is going to have an opportunity to kind of make a personal pledge inside about this, which I have found is remarkably powerful.

Take Time

The third one is a kind of complex one, and it’s about taking the time to build healthy, sexy, deep, authentic connection, to create that kind of circuitry, not to flee, and to build the tools to allow that rewiring to happen. I’m going to be talking about each one of these. Let me go back to each of these now. The first one, this question, this defining, organizing principle, this question number one, “Does my soul feel safe with this person?” I think maybe the most misguided aspect of all dating advice is all the things we put before that question. Sexual attraction takes care of itself. It’s either there, it’s not there or it grows. All of those things are possible.

Look For Your Attractions

Other kinds of attraction as well are really rich and important, and they’re all essential, but the first question is, “Am I inspired by who this human being is? Do I feel safe with who they are as a being, and with who they are in the world, and with who they are with me?” Because that is the number one definer of how happy your future is going to be with this person. I truly believe that. We get taught that the first question is, “Am I attractive enough?” Maybe the second question or for some people, the first question is, “Am I attracted enough? Is the potential for lust there?” It’s a great and fabulous question, but the first question needs to be this, because it routes you in a different direction. There’s a subtle realignment. It gives you dignity. It shifts your field. It conveys a message of self-dignifying. That shows, people feel that, and also, it’s just a different way to orient. I’m just so excited about people making that shift and having that become their primary question, and writing back to me or going to my website, DeeperDatingPodcast.com, and letting me know, and letting everyone know what shifts you see, because you will see shifts. It’s something we’re not taught. The people who find healthy love the most easily are the people who know this. It just really comes down to that, so play with this. Play with this tool and watch how it shifts you. Also, I’ll say another thing about that. When you make that your central question, you actually heal your own attachment wounds and evolve your attachment style to a healthier kind of version of itself. That’s number one, is to let that be your first question, and thinking about how that is going to shift your landscape gives me great joy just to think about. Be with someone whom your soul feels essentially safe, loved for the future.CLICK TO TWEETOkay, the second one is, and it comes from the first one, and it is recognizing your attractions of deprivation and your attractions of inspiration, and making a choice to only pursue your attractions of inspiration. I think that one of the places that people who are pursuing this path of mindful dating is getting stuck in a relationship with someone who, again and again, you see is not able to meet your needs for integrity or essential availability or mental health or presence. You try again and again and again and again, and maybe you know consciously this person is not going to ever be the one for me, or they are certainly not now, but it’s just too hard to stop. I can’t tell you how much this is an issue for so many conscious wonderful people who are just sticky, sticky, sticky in a relationship like that, and this does involve a degree of withdrawal.

  In twelve-step programs, they have a beautiful concept whether you kind of believe in God or not. They say, “Withdrawal is emptying the cup of your own self-will so that God can fill it with their will.” What does that mean for people who don’t particularly follow that kind of, you know, way of thinking is that we have these hardened patterns of clutching for love in places we’re not going to find it. I think of it like a little kid who’s got a piece of colored sharp glass in their hand, and they’re squeezing onto it so tight and their hand is bleeding, but they won’t let go because it’s pretty and precious, and people who have done so much work on themselves still struggle with letting go of relationships like this. Here’s what I want to say. Do not assume that you can do this without help; a therapist, a friend, a circle of friends. It’s painful. I remember a time that I had to do that, and someone very wise looked at me and said, “Ken, it’s going to feel like amputating your arm, but you have to do it.” It was so helpful to hear that acknowledgement of how much it hurts, and the reality that I had to do it, and I did do it. I did end that relationship, so it’s not easy to let go of our attractions of deprivation. It’s beyond not easy. Here’s another thing that fits with this. If you’re having a non-sexual relationship with someone that deep down you think you’re kind of still in love with them, even though you’re dating, even though you’re still finding people hot and attractive, a significant portion of your libido is still focused on them. It’s like trying to get out of gravity zone without enough rocket fuel, because we need all the rocket fuel we can get to do this incredibly complex metamorphosis of making a stranger into home. We fool ourselves thinking that we could often stay in touch with someone, even like have a friends with benefits kind of relationship with them, but if deep down, you’re still kind of in love with them or hoping they’ll fall in love with you, you are dramatically decreasing your chances of ever being able to really find healthy love and go with it, because you won’t have enough energy to do the hard work of rewiring that’s required for finding and nourishing new healthy love in almost all cases. I encourage all of you, at this point, even right now, you might even take a moment and really actually do this as a ritual, or just think it in your mind, that you’re going to make a conscious choice to say no to your attractions of deprivation and yes only to your attractions of inspiration. I’m going to read to you the contract that I have in my online course that I have people sign, and you can kind of just listen to this and see if you can give yourself a yes. It’s called My Commitment to My Future Happiness and Love. Here’s what it is and you can kind of just listen and say yes as you do, as you listen. “I commit out of my own self-love and my desire for a beautiful, loving relationship to develop my awareness of my circuitries of attraction to deprivation, and to protect myself from the damage and harm that those circuitries cause. Wonderfully, I also have the circuitries to be attracted to inspiration. Now, I’m making the commitment that those are the only attractions I will follow. From now on, I will only pursue my attractions of inspiration, and I will say no again and again to attractions of deprivation. I will only be with someone with whom my soul feels essentially safe, loved and supported. No one else. For my future and my dream of a love-filled life, I now make this commitment in love and respect for my vision.” See if you can kind of commit to that. If it’s ringing true, whether you made the commitment or not, if it’s ringing true, hold that close because this is really like maybe the single central greatest piece of dating wisdom that I know. This is the choice. This is the pivotal choice. I really do believe that. Let’s go on to number three, the third step. That is this incredible process of rewiring. Let’s say that you, and I’m going to share a story about that for me, so let’s say you are someone who, again and again, has been attracted to relationships that weren’t that healthy and weren’t that good. There is a new kind of way that you’re going to develop a new taste. The groundwork for that is the two steps we just talked about, but then there’s still more work, because what you’re going to find, and this is an amazing thing, is that when you do steps one and step two of what I described, your field will shift. Respect your vision, allow love to come to you, and then make the commitment.CLICK TO TWEETYou will start to lose your taste for unhealthy relationships even though, trust me, that taste won’t go away, but it will diminish. You will increase your desire and awareness of attractions of inspiration, and you’re more likely finally to find mutuality with people like that. I swear it’s true. It’s an amazing and beautiful thing that gives me great hope. I think it’s the most hopeful thing that I know and see, and it’s big. It’s why this is such a journey of self-healing, as I say all the time. When that happens, you’re going to meet somebody, you’ll meet people, you’ll find these things happening, and you’ll find they may be less spicy because, let me tell you, unavailability is a really filled, delicious, spice-filled, umami-filled flavor. It really is, and that spice is going to be missing. Now, that does not mean there aren’t glorious spices of a person who’s sexy and attractive and accomplished and amazing and a turn-on and caring, and all of these glorious, glorious things. I promise you, you will ultimately not miss the spice of unavailability. You will ultimately not miss the spice of arrogance, but in that first phase, if you’re not used to these kind of healthier relationships, they might seem boring in a way, or the thing that is so amazing is that available people are much more dangerous and frightening than unavailable assholes, no matter how sexy the unavailable assholes are, no matter how much you feel in love or obsessed with those unavailable assholes, because someone who’s really wonderful and really sees you, having them not work out hurts in a much more profound and existentially dangerous way. It’s why we protect ourselves against available people, and we do that so often by telling ourselves they’re boring, or that maybe they live 50 miles outside of the range that we think that they should live at, or they’re 2 inches too tall or 2 inches too short. You know, whatever those things are. We use all sorts of things. I speak about the wave a lot which is, you know, that kind of like spasm of fear that makes us become disinterested in someone. Also, with an available person, with an attraction of inspiration, there are tools that you can use to deepen magic attraction in intimacy. Those tools revolve around getting kind of naked in deeper ways; sharing more of your needs, asking for your needs to be met, giving more, nurturing more, touching the deeper places of sexuality, the deeper places of tenderness, the deeper places of passion, sharing scary things, sharing deep vulnerability and authenticity. Those things are rings of fire. They’re terrifying but that terror, and research backs this up, increases Eros, and increases aliveness, and increases connection and desire. If the person, when you share that vulnerability or you stretch or reach out like that, catches you, holds you, sees you, that increases joy, sexiness, warmth, intimacy, and this deep sense of goodness-based happiness that is just so kind of explosive and quiet and beautiful all at once. That’s where you want to build your home. I just want to share a story about a kind of, so there’s lots to this rewiring piece. We’ll talk about it in other episodes, but I just wanted to share just some points about that. I want to share a story. It’s about someone I dated who I had to do rewiring with. This is someone who we had been speaking on the phone for quite a long time but not meeting in person, and then we finally met in person, and I’ve told this part of the story before. I saw him and he was wearing like a thick gold chain and Elizabeth Taylor cologne for men that really smelled strong. His face was not what I pictured nor quite, you know, what he had described or showed me. I was kind of horrified and I was like, “Oh no, this is so not going to work,” but I did kind of some of the Deeper Dating® techniques that I teach in the book. I checked in with my inner self and I felt not disinterested, but in fact like warm and connected. I thought, “How am I going to negotiate this one?” I wasn’t attracted, but I was falling in love with him. I did continue to fall in love with him, but I was not attracted. There were parts of him that I was attracted to, but not enough, and I knew that I wasn’t going to fake this or do that to myself. I had spent too many years like telling myself I couldn’t be gay and be attracted to who I’m attracted. I knew I was not going to go down that route, but I knew that I was falling in love, and I knew this was an amazing man.

  I remember being with my friends, I was out at the beach, and I just kind of began to cry because I felt like I had found potential love, and I wasn’t big enough or able enough or deep enough to be able to do that because he wasn’t my type enough. There was such a deep grief in me and actually, I went out to the beach, and I kind of made a pledge. I said to myself, “I’m not leaving this beach until I get an answer.” I prayed and I asked and I prayed again and again and again, and I cried and I really had this commitment, and I don’t know when it was. I think it might have been hours later. All of a sudden, I felt this peace inside, and the message was, “This is going to be taken care of.” It was really an amazing experience. It was a mystical experience. Literally, it felt like the weather changed, and definitely the weather changed inside of me, so I went home and went to sleep, and in my dreams I had the first sexual dreams about this person. I actually felt the tendrils of turn-on begin to happen. The message that I got was, “Don’t worry about the physical attraction, it’s coming and it’s going to come. Worry about the fact that this is not someone who is right for you for some other reasons that I won’t get into, but they were really clear reasons that this was not a safe relationship to get into,” but the sex came, the turn-on came, and this kind of very amazing experience. I learned that this sex stuff is more malleable than I thought. That attraction grows differently than I was taught, and differently than we’re taught which is like, “You’re not attracted right away? Swipe left. You’re attracted? Swipe right,” but there’s such deeper stuff going on that we don’t touch. I just wanted to share that story because it was an example of rewiring that I had to do there with this person and many times after that, which I can talk about in the future episodes. What I want to say is, do any of these hit your heart? Does this person make me feel safe in my soul? Making a commitment to only choose attractions of inspiration and say no to attractions of deprivation, and to be able to do this deep and rich work of rewiring in the presence of a healthy relationship. If you get big yeses inside, I celebrate that. Ride those yeses. Feel those kinds of quiet explosions of, “Yes, this is what I want. This is what I believe,” and let it begin to download in you because it changes your field when you do that work. Thank you so much for listening. Blessings on your journey, and I look forward to connecting with you on the next episode.

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• DeeperDating®.com
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• Thomas Edison

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In this Deeper Dating Q&A episode, listeners bring their most important questions about love, sex, dating, and relationships to Ken and get his direct personal advice. Today, we’ll talk about what to do when someone you’re dating starts to pull away; deciding to become a single parent, the single most powerful way to change unhelpful dating patterns, and much more!

Table of Contents:

• Understanding Your Truth
• Not Wanting To Be More Than Friends
• Cherishing Your Core Gifts
• Extra Spark
• Mirror Image

Deeper Dating Q&A: Expert Advice For All Your Questions About Love, Dating And Sex

Welcome to the Deeper Dating Q&A, where I answer your most personal questions about love and sex and intimacy, in a way so that listeners can apply these insights to the particulars of their own intimacy journey, and leave the episode with new possibilities and hopefully, some really important revelations about their own love life, so stay tuned to the Deeper Dating Podcast. — Hello and welcome to the Deeper Dating Podcast. I’m Ken Page and I’m a psychotherapist. I’m the author of the book Deeper Dating and the Co-founder of DeeperDating.com, a site where single people can meet in an online environment that is kind and respectful and fun and inspiring. In this episode, I’m going to be answering your questions. There are some really amazing questions that I’m excited about getting to and sharing and reflecting on. In every episode, I’m going to share with you the greatest tools that I know to help you find love and keep it flourishing, and heal your life in the process, because the skills of dating are nothing more than the deep skills of intimacy, which are the most important skills of all for the kind of rich life that we all want to have. If you want to learn more about deeper dating, just go to DeeperDatingPodcast.com. You can sign up for my mailing list, get free gifts, a lot of resources, and learn more about how to use these ideas to transform your intimacy journey, and you’ll also find a complete transcript of every episode. Just a couple of more things, I want to say that everything I share in this podcast is educational in nature. It’s not medical or psychiatric advice or treatment. If you feel like you need help, please do seek professional help. You deserve that. Finally, if you like what you learn, please do feel free to subscribe and leave me a review. I always appreciate that really deeply. There are just such amazing reviews and I so appreciate that. Okay, let’s jump in. Someone called in with a really poignant question about becoming a parent as a single person. I’m very excited about responding to that. That’s one that is really very personally relevant to me, and I can share my experience, and I’m excited to share some thoughts. This person said some really kind things about Deeper Dating and acknowledged how, for the first time, she was able to end a relationship that was not healthy. She had not ever been able to do that on her own before, so she’s very thankful for that. Sometimes when we end a relationship, when we take a step that really gives us freedom and mastery and empowerment, a new door opens up. That happens so often. It’s like the deeper physics of dating. This happened for her but in a different way. The way that it happened for her was that she’s 39 years old, and she had a revelation of how much she wanted to have a child. That happened to me when I was 45 years old, 44 years old into 45.

  This was her revelation. She had never considered having a child by herself, and a friend said something to her that just profoundly influenced her. Her friend said, “You’ve always thought about having a kid like that’s when your life stops, that your freedom stops, that your life stops because you have to focus everything on the kid.” She said her friend said though, “What if your life has stopped because what you really want is to have a child, and you have blocked that and not admitted it? What if your life has stopped because you’ve blocked this deep and profound longing to have a child?” This hit her so deeply and she had an experience of uncontrollable tears. The tears just poured out in a flood, and she’s wondering about this now. She asked, “Was it scary for me to adopt a child as a single parent to take that journey myself, and how did it influence my ability to find a relationship?” I’m going to say something about that but first, I just want to talk about the power and the beauty of that experience. I want to ask listeners, have you ever had an experience where someone said something to you that released a flood of healing tears? Just take a minute. You can even pause this and think about it because those moments are so precious and so important. I remember when I was on my journey, I had a number of times like that. Once, seeing a mom with her little baby. I went into another room and all of a sudden, I was just brought to my knees in tears with the desire to have a child, and the kind of admitting of how much I wanted that. Another thing I want to say about this is it’s just there’s something so profound in this that’s a really universal thing, which is that when we have a deep truth about who we are and what we want, and we don’t live it, it is not just suppression. It is an act of quiet violence against our being. It always ends us up, this is that deeper physics thing, in a situation or situations that are somewhat masochistic, where we live a deeply reduced experience of who we are.

Understanding Your Truth

I was speaking with someone recently who had been through college and left, and didn’t have a good experience. They had this revelation which was, “I was not my true gender identity,” which is gender-fluid, non-binary. “I was not that me, so I couldn’t appreciate or live in the college experience because I was denying who I was.” This woman had a deeply rich experience of her truth which is that she so wanted a child. That was her truth. Here’s what I want to say about that. I understand that journey. Having a child is not for everyone, but if you do have that deep longing or, listeners, any deep longing that is so deep, that it actually feels like it’s your identity, or can lead you to these kinds of revelation experiences of emotion just flooding out when you recognize something. If you don’t pursue it, you limit yourself. If you don't pursue your dream, you are limiting yourself.CLICK TO TWEETI remember somebody saying something really wise to me when I was going on that journey. I just want to say this is not just about having kids. These ideas apply to your mission and your passion, and it might be to have a relationship. It could be anything. It might be to really embrace the fact that you’re an artist or you want to write a book or whatever it is. The stoppage that happens isn’t just the stoppage of that particular impulse. It’s a stoppage of the flow of your being, which has profound repercussions. I was talking to somebody about my own desire to have a child and my fear. I said, “I’m a psychotherapist. I don’t make a ton of money. I don’t have the savings that can allow me the freedom to just get an au pair and not worry about this, and I’m single, and I’m single. How am I going to do this? How am I going to date? How am I going to have a life?” She said something so beautiful and wise to me. She said, “You’re evaluating your life now and imagining what it would be like having a child in your life now, but when you make this commitment to have a child, the circle of your experience will widen and broaden.” She said that there’s a German saying which is, “A child brings its own luck,” but she said, “What that means is that the circle of your luck is going to expand,” and God knows it did, and that’s how I found my wonderful husband and now my other two children. It was through pursuing that deep longing and impulse. This is where I get to say to all of you, what’s yours? What’s your deep longing? What have been those moments that you got kind of like hit with a longing that almost felt torrential or powerful or profound? Maybe not like that, but just in some simple and steady way really identifies who you are. That is your soul and you will widen the circle of your luck by embracing that, because you’ll widen the love in your life because you’ll be living love, and in this case, love of self and love of your mission, so that’s this kind of esoteric truth, is that when we block the flow of that, we crimp our being. We diminish our being. It’s an act of quiet violence against our being, and violence begets violence. In this case, what that means is that if we reduce ourselves by not pursuing our dream, somehow we will encounter situations again and again that conspire to reduce us. As Jung said, “It’s going to feel like fate, but what it really is, is the shadow of the dreams that we are not embracing.”

Not Wanting To Be More Than Friends

Okay, so moving on next. Someone else spoke about being in her 60s and dating. What she finds is that guys keep just wanting to be friends. Again and again, the guys that she goes out with, she kind of stays in a friend zone with them because she senses that that is what they want, that they only want to be friends. She was speaking about one guy that she had gone out with for a really long time, and is still connected to that has landed kind of solidly in that friend zone, and she had a revelation. She realized that she didn’t have the courage to tell him that she was interested in exploring something deep. She said it just made her feel so vulnerable. She acknowledged that she just didn’t feel like she had the courage to do it.

  I want to zoom out for a minute and kind of look at the bigger picture here, and then zoom in and share some specific thoughts for her, but zooming out…..I think that one of the great harms, profound harms that’s done by treating the search for love as almost more like a gimmick or a series of hacks or tricks, or focusing on just making yourself more attractive, etc., the not treating it as a deep and profound growth journey, is that we miss the biggest points. One of the absolutely hugest points is that we need to become a student of our patterns. That’s how we can mark if we’re growing and progressing because we notice that we’re approaching different people. We’re becoming attracted to different people. We’re avoiding different people, that all of those things are changing, that somehow we’re meeting people who are kind of closer to what we’re looking for, closer to what I call attractions of inspiration versus attractions of deprivation. When we see that, even if we haven’t found our one yet, that is cause for such profound hope.

Cherishing Your Core Gifts

That’s the second stage of the deeper dating journey. The first stage is the discovery and naming and cherishing of your Core Gifts. The second is the re-education of your attractions because we cannot force our sexual attractions, and we should not try to. However, we can educate over time our sexual and romantic attractions, and the tools for doing that are the tools that are going to help you keep sex and love and romance alive when you find your beloved, but that’s for another episode and another discussion. The kind of first layer of experience that she has had has been the layer of experience of, “This keeps happening to me.” We all have like a lot of stories as we get older especially of, “This keeps happening to me.” Although I know 18-year-olds and 19-year-olds and 20-year-olds who totally can tell the “This is what keeps happening to me” story, but we need to stop and examine that. What is it that keeps happening for you? Because whatever that is, there’s so much to be learned from that. Not just what to stay away from, but also if anything keeps happening again and again, it’s a deeper and richer statement about the parts of ourselves that we have not learned to honor, dignify and have wiser custody over. We need to become a student of our patterns.CLICK TO TWEETThe two link, the places where we don’t love ourselves, are connected in very rich and sometimes complex, sometimes simple ways. They’re the kind of people that we’re sexually and romantically attracted to. This is a rich and amazing thing that all of us should learn to understand. In my book, in my courses, and all of my work, I teach that in really clear structured ways, which is something I’m very passionate about. Anyway, so she reached the point where she had this first story of, “This always is what keeps happening to me, which is guys keep just wanting to be my friend,” but then in reflecting in a deeper way, she realizes that there’s something deeper here, which is that she is afraid of sharing the part of herself that wants to depend, that wants to need, that wants to lean in, that wants to be held, that wants to say yes to a deeper, committed relationship, and this is gold. When we can see how we’re afraid of intimacy and playing that out, we have gold. That’s where we need to get help. That’s where we need to get support, at exactly that juncture, because that juncture is gold. It might knock us to our knees that saying that the truth will set you free but first, it will make you miserable. Yeah, that’s true but she’s got it. She’s got it and what that is, is that she is not having the courage to own her deep longing for intimacy and connectedness which is her treasure. This is your treasure, so what do you do about it? First, you validate yourself for seeing it. I want to ask every listener here to take a minute now. What is your “This always happens to me” kind of story? You know the truth of that piece of it. What might be the deeper truth of what you are afraid to reveal or honor or cherish? You might not have an answer yet. Another way to ask that question is, “What does your wiser self have to say to you about what you are not doing in your search for love? Is there any piece of wisdom, something your friends have told you, something you know that you’re kind of preferring to avoid, but you know it’s like really a big deal and really important? I had a friend who said to me once. I’ve talked about this before, but she said to me after my being single for like decades and decades, and really upset about it and wanting a partner. She said, “Ken, I know why you don’t have a partner and you kind of know why too.” I said, “Please educate me because no, I don’t.” She said, “You’re always going to the bars. You’re always going to the clubs. You’re going to look for people in those environments, but not in places with people who share your values.” I proceeded to ignore that with great passion for about 8 to 10 more years, and then finally, kind of was brought to my knees and said, “Yeah, that’s true and that’s what I need to do.” Anyway, what I want to say to you, you’re feeling like you don’t have the courage. When we feel like we don’t have the courage for something, there is a simple response to that. We do the internal processes to build courage. Yes, but we don’t bank on those. We don’t count on those. We almost give up on those, trying to pull ourselves up by our bootstraps, and we look for connection and support. I promise you, you will be able to take that next step infinitely better if you have friends or a coach or a therapist or a group or a combination thereof of people who can support you in this terrifying experience of saying, “This is who I really am, and this is what I want.”

  The liberation that you will experience with that will not only impact your relationship with this person, it will impact your life because like the last piece I talked about, that holding back of who you are, which is this precious quality of longing for a deeper connection. When you hold that back, you hold you back, and everything there gets crimped and stuck and blocked as a result. Terrifying? Yes. Thrilling? Absolutely. Don’t try to do it alone. I want to say this to each one of you as well. If there’s a pattern that you want to change or break, don’t try to do it alone because your life will not expand in the way that it needs to. It is an incredible truth how interdependent we are. It is wiser to give up on trying to pull yourself up by your bootstraps. It is truly wiser and get help because time is precious, and I can pretty much promise you that you will speed your journey so much more beautifully with the proper support. Everybody who is listening, take a moment to just think about where that might apply to you in your precious, precious life and intimacy journey. For the next few Q&As, I’m going to go a lot, lot quicker because I’m kind of backed up in the Q&As, but please keep sending them to me. I love them. I adore them and I get to them little by little. The next ones, I’m going to do are a little bit quicker. Someone called into the Ask Ken section of my Deeper Dating Podcast website, which is how you can leave your questions. I had a number of people that responded after my podcast episode about chemistry. She said that there was a guy that she went out with, and they had good sex. They had a beautiful connection. He was a lovely guy but she ultimately, in that process of dating, went back to someone who was a toxic, intense rollercoaster relationship. She was heartbroken for that person, and she ended this relationship, then she listened to my chemistry podcast and she asked me, “If I look at this guy with new eyes, is there a chance that I could fall in love with him?” I want to respond to that. Those white-hot, crazy attractions of deprivation grab us, and they grab us in a really vulnerable place. They grab us in all the places where we feel like we’re not worthy of being loved. We finally are almost getting loved by someone who also can see the ways that we’re not worthy of being loved, but will choose to love us anyway. That’s the construct, and that’s the unbelievable excitement of these people. Our psyche wants to go back to the scene of the original crimes and finally be loved right. Don't pressure yourself romantically. Give yourself space, and enjoy the person that you are.CLICK TO TWEETIt’s white-hot. It’s intense, but what it doesn’t have is that place of deep peace. I say this all the time, and I’ll say it again. When you have that feeling of deep peace because of someone’s goodness and integrity, and they’re hot and they’re sexy, and they love you and they’re there, and when you see how they look into your eyes, you see the love there, that’s happiness. That’s where you want to build your home, and that exists. Those are attractions of inspiration. What I would say to you is there is absolutely a chance that you could fall in love. If it’s not too late, get to know this person. Follow the ideas that I talk about in the chemistry podcast which are don’t pressure yourself sexually, don’t pressure yourself romantically, give yourself space, enjoy the person, kind of let yourself fetishize the personality and sexual and physical things that you like about them. Let yourself taste those, reflect on them. Let yourself fantasize about sex with this person. Let yourself fantasize about enjoyable times with this person. Use these tools to grow Eros, which is what you’re going to do in a long-term relationship anyway. It’s fun and it’s a beautiful thing to do, and it’s a tool that we all need, so do that.

Extra Spark

So often, your focus, get to know this guy if it’s still a possibility, but here’s what I would say. Who knows if that like kind of extra spark that you felt was missing will come? If it doesn’t come, you will know. If it comes and goes, then you know that this is worth pursuing and exploring. What happens when it comes? What happens when it goes? If it comes in a strong way, which it really might, that’s a glorious thing.

Mirror Image

Okay, I’m trying to move a little more quickly so I’m going to move to the next one now, which is just kind of so fascinating. It’s the mirror image. It’s someone who also has spoken about how much she has kind of loved this content, and how it has helped her and changed her. She said, “I was with someone who saw me as what I call an attraction of inspiration, but he went back to a toxic rollercoaster relationship.” She suspects that it’s the wave of distancing, which is when someone is available and decent and kind, and all of a sudden, we lose interest in them, and we kind of start devaluing them in our head, or all of a sudden, we start remembering this hot, unhealthy relationship, and we want to go back there. This is such a deep human tendency that we have not been instructed about. She said she feels compelled to share what she has learned from Deeper Dating, this concept of the wave, which I think is the single biggest saboteur of healthy, new love. She wondered, “Should I speak to this guy? Should I tell him what I’ve learned?” I would say, “Sure.” You can kind of offer one of my Psychology Today articles, the podcast episode, or any of those things where I talked about the wave and say, “I just wonder what you think about this, and might this have been something that has been true for us?” That’s really all you can do. If there’s continued dialogue, then that’s great, but you can certainly offer that. I just feel like, absolutely, why not, but realize that this person is in the throes of an avoidance of intimacy, quite possibly, and also quite possibly, a romantic obsession, and those are powerful things like any addiction that we don’t have as much control over as we’d like to, but I say, “Sure, why not plant the seed?”

  The last question for today is somebody who thanked me also for this work and said that his main learning has been a deeper learning to love himself, but here is his question. The concept of attractions of deprivation and inspiration, you can find those in earlier episodes. I talk about two circuitries of attraction, Attractions of Inspiration, where attraction and Eros grows because of a person’s goodness, availability, integrity, love and caring for us, combined with the fact that they have to be sexy and attractive to us, or an Attraction of Deprivation, which is where we kind of are chasing love. What he asked me was, “Can there be elements of deprivation in an attraction of inspiration?” To which I say, “Absolutely, 100% yes.” This is so infinitely not black and white. We’re human and we’re all filled with holes and gaps and triggers and traumas, but the question is, “Is something essentially so? Is someone committed to curating a life where they are essentially decent and honest and integrity-based? Do they have an unstabilized serious psychiatric condition that they’re not working on? Do they have an active, serious addiction?” These are all things that can help you decide if, overall, this is something that is safe to pursue, but within that, Harville Hendrix says this really beautifully. He says, “We come to a point in our intimate relationship, often, years in, where the thing we most need from our partner is the thing that they’re least able to give us, and that’s not the end of love. That’s the beginning of conscious, deeper love because you build bridges together, and you work on that together,” so absolutely, but the question is, “Over time, is there an essential, basic sense of trust in the person’s goodness and integrity and availability and decency, and all of those basic, basic things?” If that is there, then you work on that other stuff. That’s hard and difficult and ongoing and stressful, and also wonderful, but that’s the work. The thing is you want somebody who is able and willing to do that work with you, and cares and is committed enough to do it, so that’s my kind of answer on that. Thank you all for listening. I look forward to connecting with you on the next episode of the Deeper Dating Podcast. You might even just want to take a minute now and just ask yourself, what touched you most in this? What’s a message in this episode that touches you and matters and that you want to carry forward in your own life? Thank you all so much. Have a great day.

Important Links:

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• DeeperDating.com
• Jung
• Harville Hendrix

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One of the greatest gifts you can give yourself is to create a personal practice that delivers daily access to deeper wisdom about your own love life. In this episode, I’ll teach you how to create a personal practice that can truly change your future. Over time, your practice will deepen you, make you more capable of loving, and help you become so much more skilled at finding love, intimacy, wisdom–and passion too!

Table of Contents:

• The Two Things That Made The Biggest Difference
• Understanding Meditation
• Create Your Own Personal Practice
• Tapping Acupuncture Points

Create Your Personal Love-Wisdom Practice

Finding Your Inner Intimacy-GPS

In this episode, I’m going to help you craft a personal practice to bring deeper wisdom into your intimacy journey, so stay tuned to this very important and special episode of the Deeper Dating Podcast. — Hello and welcome to the Deeper Dating Podcast. I’m Ken Page and I’m a psychotherapist. I’m the author of Deeper Dating and the Cofounder of DeeperDating.com, which is a new site where single people can meet in an environment that’s fun, kind, respectful and inspiring. Today, I’m going to talk about spiritual practice as a tool to help you in your search for love, and I’m going to help you craft your own personal spiritual practice to support you in your intimacy journey. In every one of these episodes, I’m going to share the greatest tools that I know to help you find love and keep it flourishing and heal your life in the process, because the skills of dating are the skills of love, and the skills of love are the greatest skills of all for a happy, rich, meaningful life. If you want to learn more about the deeper dating path to real intimacy, just go to DeeperDatingPodcast.com and you can sign up for my mailing list, and get lots and lots of free things, and lots and lots of resources, as well as complete transcript of every episode, including this one. I also want to say that everything I share in this podcast is educational in nature. It’s not medical or psychiatric advice or treatment. If you’re experiencing any psychological symptoms that concern you, it’s a great idea to get professional help. Finally, if you like what you’re learning here, I would love it if you could leave me a review, subscribe, etc. Thank you so much for that. Okay, so let’s jump in.

  I think the intimacy path is very much a wisdom path. I know in my experience, it is on and on, again and again about what I can learn, what I need to learn about the obstacles that I hit in myself, the ways that I refine how I interact with people, just lessons about love that come and come and come, and meditation or a practice that really speaks to you speeds your journey to your own personal wisdom. What could be better than that? It’s just such an incredibly important, important thing.

The Two Things That Made The Biggest Difference

I remember thinking, what are the things that allowed me most to move from chronically single and enacting these patterns again and again that I really, really thought would work, and just didn’t work again and again? What were the things? The two things that made the biggest difference to me were my support group of chronically single shrinks and the friends who mentored me. That kind of connection and support that got me out of my own patterned attempts to find love, that were failing again and again as much as I believed in them, and the other was a spiritual practice. I did for a long time, I still do a spiritual practice. I am someone who’s been meditating I guess about 40 years in my life, a really, really long time. I’ll say a little bit more about that, but during the time that I committed to my search for love in a more intense way, I had a daily spiritual practice that was specifically about finding love. As much as anything, these particular two things, my spiritual practice and the connection and support of other people who could take me out of my patterned ways of doing things, those were the big things that made the hugest, hugest difference. I believe in them so much and they’re humbling. They’re both humbling because in both of those cases, it’s this realization that my patterned ways that I believed in so deeply just like weren’t the wisest way to do this, and so meditation was really important to me. If you're experiencing any psychological symptoms that concern you, it's a great idea to get professional help.CLICK TO TWEET

Understanding Meditation

I’m going to talk a little bit more very shortly about the practices that I used, that I believe in so deeply, and work with you to create your own personal practice, meditation practice, spiritual practice that is built and designed to help you in your precious and amazing and profoundly important search for love, but first, I want to talk a little bit about the value of meditation, but I’m going to precede that with something else. I just want to say, if you are thinking, “I can’t meditate because I can’t still my mind,” welcome to the club. I have been meditating for 40 years and I cannot still my mind. It’s the rarest thing in the world for me to still my mind. Now, does that mean that my meditations aren’t life-changing, beautiful, amazing, delicious, powerful, essential? No. They are but I just suck at stilling my mind and you can still meditate. I’m going to talk about that a little bit more. Also, meditation does not have to be this dry, boring thing. I hate dry, boring meditation. I can’t stand it. My meditations are rich and intense and beautiful and life-changing. Don’t think that you just need to do a meditation that bores you. I will say though that some of the meditations that you might think are boring, like some of the meditations of watching your breath or saying a mantra are anything but boring when you stay with them. They can be deep and rich and amazingly beautiful. I’m just saying that too, but you don’t have to do them. You do not have to have rigor. You do not have to have amazing discipline. You just do your best. I just want to share a story with you. As someone who is a very serious meditator and has been for like a crazy, crazy long amount of time, I follow a particular path of meditation. I will say that my guru, my spiritual teacher is a man named Paramahansa Yogananda who came to the States. He was the first Indian teacher to come to the States and stay for a really, really long time teaching. He was beloved by Gandhi. Gandhi bequeathed some of his ashes to him and he was just a great soul. I follow, since I was seventeen, his meditation path.

  Unfortunately, Self-Realization Fellowship, his organization, has some homophobic elements or has had them, and that has been a little bit difficult for me but he’s still my guru, my spiritual teacher, and his meditations are my meditations, and I love him dearly and deeply, even if his community might be somewhat misguided in that area. Anyway, so I was at a retreat and I had not yet received the next level of initiations, and I was talking to my friend, Paul, who was very smart, and I said to him, he said, “Well, why haven’t you done this next series of meditations?” I said, “Because I’m such a sloppy meditator. I’m so bad at it. I have so little rigor. I have so little discipline.” He said to me, “Fine. Take the next level of meditations and be like a sloppy meditator with no rigor and keep doing them,” so that is what I did. I learned and I believe in deeply the beauty of sloppy spiritual practice. Meaning, if your heart is in it, if you choose a meditation that speaks to your soul, if your meditation touches you, who cares? Now, if you can have more rigor and discipline than me, and many people do, three cheers for you, but you don’t need it. I just want to speak up in praise of sloppy spiritual practice. Do you do it? Do you put heart into it? If so, your meditations will be getting more and more beautiful, powerful and meaningful if they’re ones that speak the language of your heart, and today, we’re going to help you find what those are. Going back to Yogananda, my teacher, he said something so beautiful, and I haven’t been able to find the exact quote but it was something like this. It was that left to their own devices, left to our own devices, our hearts become flinty and hard. They just are prone to do that as we live unless we have relationships and practices that soften our hearts again and again, and that’s one of the things that meditation does. It softens our hearts and when our hearts soften, we see our relationships with more compassion. We also see ourselves with more clarity. To me, those are two of the more amazing things that happen in meditation. Is I gain compassion. I decenter from my rigidity, and the other piece that happens in my meditation is that I just see things clearer. It doesn’t make me fuzzy thinking. It makes me more of a practical clear thinker and I adore those things. In the arena of dating, there’s a twelve-step sentence that’s something like, in that area, my mind is not a safe neighborhood to be alone in, and when it comes to dating and intimacy and all of our stuck places around intimacy, I promise you, our minds are not safe neighborhoods to be alone in. I think that what we need to be feeling, and this is something that I would like to ask you to think about if it’s something you’re experiencing, is a kind of ongoing way that there’s an influx of new ideas, new wisdom, new compassion, new awareness. If that’s happening for you already on a regular basis, that’s glorious. If it’s not, it probably will if you take on a practice, and I’m talking ten minutes a day to start, five minutes a day if it needs to be five minutes a day. Meditation softens our hearts. When our hearts soften, we see our relationships with more compassion.CLICK TO TWEETOther things that happen for me in my meditation, I often say that my meditation is pretty always the best part of my day, and the reason is that in my meditation, all the joys of my day kind of get distilled down, and I get to like taste their sweetness and their nature and their flavor. They get essentialized. They get distilled, and I can really feel and sense their nature, their essence, so meditation takes the beautiful moments of my life and gives that to me, and also gives me wisdom. I don’t know, but to me, it’s just the most fabulous, fabulous feeling in the world to feel like I’m gaining intimacy wisdom. That’s something that stuck, got me stuck or scared or blocked or helpless, that all of a sudden, there’s this influx of wisdom that doesn’t feel like it’s something I knew or understood before, but I gain it and I could just feel, “Oh, I just learned something.” That’s a wonderful thing, and that is also what meditation offers. I wanted to say this thing about don’t worry about meditating correctly and I wanted to talk a little bit about the beauty of meditation. I’ll say that some other things that happen in meditation are a sense of expansion, a sense of peace, a sense of transcendence, a sense of touching something vast like, “Holy cow, I’m standing on the edge of the Grand Canyon,” and I’m in awe and I’m scared. This is vaster than I expected, and it’s so dimensional and rich, and there’s heart in it and it’s me. I’m a little scared, but wow. That kind of awe of experiencing something that’s like slightly, slightly transcendent, or maybe even more than slightly transcendent, so those are some of the beautiful, wonderful things I wanted to say about meditation.

Create Your Own Personal Practice

Now, I want to help you kind of create a practice for yourself, and I want to offer you a few ideas. One is a contemplative kind of prayer practice that for me was a really, really important part of my spiritual practice to find love, and made a huge, huge, huge, huge difference. I actually teach this contemplative practice. It’s an ancient practice and I teach it in episode 26 in pretty good detail, but I’m going to give you kind of the basics of it here, and the basics are that you find the words that touch your heart deeply about your search for love, and it’s okay for the words to be an ask, like universal spirit, or maybe you don’t even name it, or maybe you say goddess, or maybe you say God, or maybe you say wisdom or strength inside me, untapped wisdom inside me. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter. Whatever it is, it’s beautiful and it’s vaster than our limited little mind, and we call on it. It’s like you ask, you ask and that asking should evoke a kind of real like longing, or a sense of this longing for a relationship in me is so true. It almost burns. It’s so deep. It’s so true. Yes, it hurts. Yes, it’s sad. Yes, it’s exquisite but it’s my truth and I’m going to ask. I’m going to ask the universe for help in making this dream happen. It doesn’t mean that I’m not going to do my own efforts, but it means that this vast and humble reaching out of arms and just asking is something that I do.

  I had a prayer that I said. I tried to do it ten minutes a day but it burned so much that often I could only do it for five minutes a day, just because it touched such an ache inside of me and touched fears, “What if I can’t have this?” Lots of intense stuff, which all of which are symbols, not symbols but signs that I was really close to my heart and signs that because it hurt, because it burned, that it was real and it was true. For me, this one was God, because the word God works for me but it doesn’t have to work for you, but “God bless me that I choose my life companion based on your ways of perfect soul unity.” Here’s what I would do and here’s what the contemplative practice is. I would say the prayer and then I would feel the waves of emotion that came afterwards, then so when that happened, I would ride those waves. I would stay with them until they subsided, and then I would say it again, and maybe the second time, I’d be thinking about my shopping list and it would be like useless. I would just start again and say the words, “God bless me that I choose my life companion based on your ways of perfect soul unity,” then I would have a flare-up of, “Yeah but what about sex? What about sexual attraction? What about that?” I would calm myself down and say, “Yes, Ken, that too, that too,” but this was this huge lesson that I learned and I teach that when you put soul unity first, of course, you have to be attracted, but when you make that first your priority, your world changes, everything changes. This is something we are not taught and this is the way that you make your entire search for love a spiritual practice. You say it. When you have waves of emotion, you ride them. You feel them. You experience those ripples, and when they subside, you do it again. When you’re not focusing, you don’t have to wait for the ripples to subside because there probably won’t be any ripples. You just go back and do it again. You just do this and deepen into the heart of it. Whatever your words are, you might find a prayer you really love, you might just say, “Help me, help me find the love I seek.” You don’t need fancy words. It does not need to be pretty. It does not need to be iconic. It could be like a grunt or a call or an ache. It can be a sound. It could be a note that you hit. It could be anything. Find the words that touch your heart deeply about your search for love.CLICK TO TWEETThat’s the point here is that it doesn’t matter what it is. What matters is, does it touch your heart? Does it maybe bring tears to your eyes? Does it make you long? Does it touch you in a deep place? If it does, then that’s what you use, and it will change you, it will change you. Does it burn sometimes? Yes. Is it hard? Yes, it is, but it’s so worth it because it will reshape your being in alignment with this intention over time. That’s one idea for a practice. I’ll share some other ones too. There’s the inner mentor practice, which I adore endlessly and I teach in episode 3, and I teach in a lot of places, and I’ll say just briefly what it is now. It’s imagining a you on the other side of all of your inner glass ceilings. It’s like imagining the you that you’re meant to be, unfolded, unfurled, alive, and you don’t have to earn it or be it. You just have to imagine it like a fantasy. Then you look at that being’s eyes and face, and what that reflects. This you that is just such pure, beautiful essence of you, and then you do this thing like method acting, where you jump in and you become that you, even if you don’t deserve it, even if you haven’t earned it, even if you haven’t gotten there, because you won’t have gotten there but you imagine, and in a way, it’s more than an imagination because it’s you. It tastes like you. It feels like you. It’s you. It’s essence of you, and you look at the you of today and you think, “What guidance do I want to call out to the me of today?” I go over this practice in a lot more detail in episode 3, but you do that and then you take the message, and all you need to do is write it down and let it become your daily meditation, for that day, and all you need to do is love that meditation, and the more you do this, the more you become that being, and the more you become closer and closer to being that being, the more your magnetic field shifts and love and wisdom and healthy relationships end up coming towards you. That’s why this is so much a spiritual path of growth in the deepest and richest ways.

Tapping Acupuncture Points

I will share another practice that I love and it’s called tapping, and I haven’t done this yet but I will do, and I’m going to bring in a teacher who’s going to teach tapping to my audience. Many of you know tapping already, but it’s tapping along certain acupressure points, acupuncture points and then following a protocol. There are over 100 clinical studies proving the efficacy of this process that kind of like not only reduces stress, but can be used for meditation and brings you into a much deeper place. Every morning, I start out by doing twenty minutes of tapping, and then I do the inner mentor process. That’s my morning meditation and my coffee, of course. I love those morning meditations. I treasure them. They’re really, really wonderful.

I am all for, as you know, as I’ve said, meditations that focus on the breathing or focus on whatever that are kind of less directed to your search for intimacy, but that’s what I’m asking you to consider here is to craft a spiritual practice that focuses on your precious search for intimacy. You would not have listened to this whole podcast if this didn’t resonate for you in some way. You wouldn’t be listening to any of my podcasts if this stuff didn’t resonate for you, so I just want to honor your longing for growth and healing, and say that some of the ideas are an inner mentor to help you in your intimacy journey. This contemplative practice of prayer or just stating something or asking for something, those are two practices. You might find others that really speak to you. You might create a song and sing that song. You could do so many millions of different things. I’ll share a story here. One of my great mentors was a man named John McNeill. He was a Jesuit priest who wrote a book called The Church and the Homosexual. He was kicked out of the Jesuit order for his homosexuality by a Cardinal who then became Pope Benedict. Anyway, he was a wonderful, wonderful hero and mentor of mine and my spiritual director. He told me at one point that he always felt guilty because he could not do a prayer in the morning. He had to sit down with his coffee and his New York Times. He just had to, and he kept telling himself to be more spiritual and pray first, but for years and I guess decades, he didn’t, so finally, it hit him. He was going to create an organic spiritual practice, so he prayed The Times. He would read The Times and if anything moved him or touched him, his compassion, his joy, his concern, he would craft and ask a prayer, a blessing, something in that moment. That, he was able to do, and for the rest of his life, he was able to do a morning spiritual practice, so what I want to say to you is whether it’s walking meditation or singing or anything, that you consider how to craft a practice that really speaks the language of your heart. In my book, Deeper Dating, Chapter 6 is completely devoted to this, and you’ll also find a number of podcast episodes that focus on this to different degrees, but I want to hear your stories because you want a practice that is going to inject this magic, bigger wisdom into your search for love and your intimacy life, and it will change you and make you more of the person, and rewire you and reshape you to be the person who you want to be, and who is so much more capable of living and feeling love. You can go to DeeperDatingPodcast.com and click Ask Ken, and share your stories about how you found a practice, how you created a practice, what that practice is like for you that’s specifically focused on your intimacy journey, and I’ll do my best to read these out because I think people will be inspired by them. Good luck on your journey of crafting your own beautiful spiritual practice for your search for love and your intimacy journey, and I look forward to connecting on the next episode of the Deeper Dating Podcast.

Important Links:

• Deeper Dating
• DeeperDating.com
• Paramahansa Yogananda
• Gandhi
• Self-Realization Fellowship
• episode 26 – A Practice That Can Lead You to Love
• episode 3
• John McNeill
• The Church and the Homosexual

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What can we do to protect ourselves from the physical and emotional risks in online dating? And what are the keys to handling the stress, anxiety, and burnout online dating can create? In this interview with brilliant online dating innovator, fearless adventurer and humanitarian Charly Lester, we’ll explore how you can better protect and care for yourself in your online dating life. Table of Contents

• Dating And Safety
• Dating Apps Dehumanizing People
• Advice On Online Dating
• Charly’s Fire
• Being Your True Self
• Red Flags

How To Protect Heart, Soul And Self In Online Dating: An Interview With Charly Lester

How To Practice Self-Care And Self-Protection In The World Of Online Dating

What can you do to protect yourself from the physical and emotional risks in online dating, and what are the keys to handling the stress and the anxiety and the burnout online dating can create? In this interview with brilliant online dating innovator and humanitarian Charly Lester, we’re going to explore how you can better protect and care for yourself in your online dating life, so stay tuned to this episode of the Deeper Dating Podcast. — Hello, everybody, and welcome to the Deeper Dating Podcast. I’m Ken Page and I’m a psychotherapist. I’m the author of the book Deeper Dating and the Cofounder of DeeperDating.com, a site where single people can meet in an online environment that is fun, inspiring, kind and respectful. In this podcast, I am so excited to be interviewing Charly Lester. Let me tell you a little bit about Charly. She is one of the world’s leading dating industry experts. She’s a serial entrepreneur and she currently runs a successful marketing consultancy business for dating apps and tech startups. She launched her first business at age 30, which was The Dating Awards. Most famously, she cofounded Lumen, which is the dating app for over 50s, which has been the fastest-growing dating app in the world in 2019, and she was profiled in Forbes in 2018 and she is currently preparing to launch her fifth business, Peaches & Poppies, which is a plus-size activewear brand inspired by her own struggles to find triathlon-specific clothing which accommodates her curves. I adore this. Charly is the former dating editor for The Guardian and the global head of dating for Time Out. She’s been on BBC News Night representing the online dating industry. In 2015, she was an expert advisor to Lord Sugar in the final of The Apprentice, and she’s a regular guest on Radio 4 Woman’s Hour. She’s also an ambassador for the charity Survivors Manchester, which supports male survivors of rape and sexual assault. She cycled from Land’s End to John O’Groats in 2016 and completed her first Ironman in 2018 in aid of this charity. In her spare time, she enjoys Ironman Triathlons and played for team Romania in the Roller Derby World Cup, and recently completed the Marathon des Sables, six marathons in five days across the Sahara Desert. She is the dating industry expert for RealMe, which is a company that has developed solutions to make dating apps safer. There are just worlds of things that we’re going to be talking about together, but one of the biggest and most central ones is how people can keep themselves safe emotionally, physically, and spiritually in their online dating experience. If you want to know more about Deeper Dating, and I’ll be telling you all the different ways that you can connect with Charly and her work, and giving you all the links in the transcript. If you want to know more about the Deeper Dating path to real intimacy, just go to DeeperDatingPodcast.com and you’ll get free gifts. You’ll learn a lot more about the ideas we speak about, and you’ll get a complete transcript of every episode including this one. I also just want to say that everything I share on this podcast is educational in nature. It’s not medical or psychiatric advice or treatment. Finally, if you like what you’re learning here, if you like what Charly has to say, if you have any questions, it would just be a tremendous thank you if you subscribed, left me a review or just went to the Ask Me section of DeeperDatingPodcast.com, and share any thoughts, feedback or questions about what you hear in this episode. Thank you so much and we are going to jump in right now. — Charly, it’s so great to have you here. Thank you for having me. I originally just was so impressed by the quality of your dating advice, which is non-gimmicky and heartfelt and practical, and the combination of the kind of humanitarian aspect of your work that kind of just so integrates in, as well as your sense of adventure. All of the things that are wonderful and kind of part of the dating experience. I would just like to start out by having you talk about this current passion of yours, which is the issue, well, current and ongoing, but this passion for creating safety; physical, emotional and spiritual, for people who are doing online dating. I just love to hear any of your thoughts and reflections, and what this means to you. I think I’m probably part of the new wave of dating entrepreneurs in a way because I’ve come at this industry at an age where I was dating still, so if you look at the first people who created online dating sites, a lot of them had been married for like 10, 15 years before online dating came around, and so they never really experienced their products. I think that’s where, you know, I’m in my late 30s and a lot of my sort of fellow entrepreneurs that is in their age, we dated on Tinder, right? We were there the first year that it launched. I worked at Gaydar for a time, and all of my colleagues, they were all on Gaydar. I think it makes a real difference when you’re actually dating on these products because suddenly you understand the world in a different way. My entry point into the dating industry was I wrote a blog. I went on 30 blind dates before I turned 30. Sometimes, we give ourselves different advice from the advice that we would give other people.CLICK TO TWEETAs a result of that blog, I was constantly being asked questions by people all around the world about dating, and so I think because I came into this kind of an inverted commerce dating expert role as the dater, and just my expertise comes from having been on thousands of dates rather than an academic qualification or anything like that. I think it does mean that my advice is often more practical and more kind of in the trenches, and I have seen the experience, yes, I’m a straight female in my late 30s, a straight white female in my 30s, but I’ve seen the experiences of so many different people in this dating space because of writing the blog and speaking to so many people. I worked for Gaydar, which is a men’s, a gay dating app but I also worked, you know, obviously at Lumen, which is for over 50s. I’ve worked with demographics that I don’t belong to, which I think is really important because actually the best thing you can do, I believe as a founder of a product for the people, is listen to your users. With Lumen, I had a profile in-app where literally, people could message me any time of day and it said, “I’m the cofounder of Lumen.” It went straight to my phone. It wasn’t my community operations team pretending to be me. It was literally me answering questions at 11:00 at night on my phone to someone who said, “Hey, can you help me improve my dating profile? I’ve just messaged this guy and he’s not messaging me back. What would you recommend?” I think when you start talking to people and you start recognizing the problems that people face time and again, and I’m sure we’ll talk about Lumen in more detail later, but the whole reason I launched Lumen was because that was the question for like four years that I kept being asked, “My mom’s just got divorced. Which dating apps should she use?” I never had an answer. For me, a good skill in an entrepreneur is if you keep seeing the same problem in multiple places, and you can come up with a solution for it, that’s a suggestion that maybe that solution is needed. That definitely, within the dating space, I’ve seen it time and time again where something is being asked for and no one is catering for it.

Dating And Safety

I deeply agree with that and that was kind of how I began in this entire journey. I was a single gay man who adopted a child and I had no time, and I thought, “What would be the most healing and effective way for me to meet people?” Also, I was an incredibly unskilled dater and I really had to be a student of what I was doing wrong to begin to change that, so I love that. I love that in the trenches kind of approach and caring about kind of the pain that you saw, and the missing pieces that you saw again and again. I would like to hear from you kind of just around this issue of safety; physical safety and emotional safety. Kind of, what are the things that stand out for you in the over 50 community, in any community at all? What are the key things that stand out for you? I think in terms of practical safety, I think the key thing, always, is to remember that you’re talking to strangers, and that applies even up on your third date, right? This is a third date. You’ve probably spent 4 or 5 hours in that person’s company. I always liken it to a fellow traveler on a train journey. I mean, you wouldn’t give that person your wallet and your address and your car keys, right? You hear these stories of people’s cars being stolen on a second date. I was like, “It’s because you handed your car keys to a stranger.” The reality is because we let our heart take over from our head. I think from a practical safety perspective, it’s remembering in those early stages, to try to listen to your head and to almost be like your brutal best friend. When you’re rushing ahead with things, think about it from the perspective of if your friend was telling you this story, what advice would you give him or her? I think sometimes we give ourselves different advice to the advice that we would give other people. I think that that’s really important. I think from an emotional perspective, I think the problem and I say this is someone who’s worked for multiple dating apps. I think one of the problems of dating apps, a by-product of dating apps is that people have become products, right? We can see people in the same way that we can view apartments, right, on an app on our phone. If I’m online shopping or if I’m looking for an apartment, then I click a load of things that I want and I can specify exactly what I want, right? “I need three bedrooms. I need a garage for my car.” Well, real life isn’t like that and people are not products, but the way that we see dating apps and the filters we see on dating apps, we start to dehumanize people. I think that that’s the problem with online dating, is to step away. We forget there are people in our pocket. We just see these cards that are the faces and the ages and the names, and we suddenly start forgetting there’s a real human being on the other side. I can remember really early on when I was writing my blog. I matched with a guy in the early days of Tinder, and we never went on the date, and part of it was from the way that he behaved with me. I met him six months later and he was a really lovely guy and I actually called him up on it. I said, “You are so nice. Why were you like this?” He admitted it himself. He said, “I know. I was chatting so many women. I forgot you were a real person and I just didn’t treat you how I would.” He was such a good friend, honestly, and I think that what’s quite startling is people behave completely differently to how they would in real life, and so you’re only seeing this one side of their personality. The gamification, the way that the app is designed to be a bit like a game to keep us on there, well it brings out that side of that person, and it’s not their whole self but it’s just what we see of them. I think the key is partly to remember there is a game aspect to this, that this is not total real life. It’s a great way to introduce you to people but it’s not the be-all and end-all.

  It can get really consuming in the same way that our cellphones are really consuming, right? These days, we spend so much time on our phones that a lot of people I hear are saying, “Oh, this feels like a second job that I’m having to spend hours on.” If you are feeling like this is not fun, if this is feeling like a second job, if you can’t bring yourself to go on and reply to people, then just take a break. We shouldn’t have to, you know, and I would say this to someone who’s been single now for about two years. You shouldn’t have to spend all your time on dating apps. It is one of those things I think you should do in bursts, and you do it when you’re enjoying it, and then when you’re not enjoying it, you step away from it and do something else because otherwise, you’re not bringing your full best you to the table anyway. I can remember when I first started in the dating blog and I was going on three dates a week for this blog. I remember turning up on a date. I had wet hair because I’d just gone for a swim. I didn’t have any makeup on and I just didn’t care, right?

Being Your True Self

I looked at myself and I actually, because on these dates, I would evaluate the date. Not the guy, but I would give the date that we went on marks out of ten, and on that write up I gave myself 2 out of 10 because I knew that I hadn’t brought my A-game to that date, and it wasn’t fair on the other person. I think that, you know, if you are feeling like your mental health is starting to get a bit sapped or just feeling a bit drained by it all, then take a step away because for me, I think the whole point of dating and the whole point of finding someone is by being your true self, right? I always say this, my advice when it comes to dating profiles is, “Don’t use filters. Don’t lie about anything because you’re not going to attract the right person, but you still need to be your proper self to attract the right person too. If you’re a rundown, knackered is a very English term, tired version of yourself. If you’re a rundown knackered version of yourself, then you’re not actually going to attract the right people for you. Because you’re going to attract people who maybe feed off that energy, and actually it could be quite disruptive to go at it when you’re feeling 25% or 50% because I feel like the type of people you’re going to attract is going to be a completely different type of person. I think that being quite self-aware, I think could be quite important in this and not just feeling like, “Oh, my God. I’ve been single for so long. I have to carry on at this even if I’m not enjoying it because when it comes down to it, this is your life, right? This is a part of your life and it should be enjoyable. You are spending time that you could be spending seeing your friends, doing other stuff, going on these dates. If you’re not enjoying it, just take some time out. That’s really great advice, and there are so many pieces to what you said. One is a kind of curation of self, that we don’t get to forget ourselves when we’re doing online dating. It’s really, really part of the experience. There’s been research and I’d love there to be more research on this, but this is something I have really found to be true. That when we get into what I call swipe circuitry, which is that gamification headspace, not only do we not notice the deeper qualities in somebody, but we actually are drawn more to our “scratch the itch” type. Research shows that the “scratch the itch” type is not always the best type. That’s why, in all the work that I do, I say, there’s one key question that we need to ask. Does my soul feel safe with this person? Is there a sense of deep safety? The same with ourselves as well. I love the different things that you’re saying, and that you could take a break. When you are not feeling in a centered, good place, you are not obligated to go out there and try to like gather more numbers. There’s a curation and a self-care, which I think is just wonderful. I think that’s a really good point.

Red Flags

I think one of the key red flags for me is if something happens that you feel like you can’t tell your friends about, you know, like someone treats you in a way. That if you told your friends, they would tell you, “Don’t see this person again.” I think the minute you get into that territory, then you need to take a step back. If you can’t tell your best friends about the dating experience for some reason, then there’s something wrong, right? Again, that kind of goes back to being your own best friend. I love that. That is fabulous. That’s for everyone to remember because we kind of allow ourselves to compromise things that really matter to us, and when we do it and we don’t want to talk about it, then we’re engaging in acts that have a little bit of shame, and that is going to draw us to people who are prone to taking advantage of that. That’s a great point. Charly, can I ask you to introduce your friend here? I have two dogs. One under the chair and one on my lap. This is Hugo. You can just see him there behind the microphone, and then under my chair, Dudley is asleep. I have two sausage dogs.

Dating Apps Dehumanizing People

Thank you so much for the introduction. I would love to hear your thoughts about kind of there’s a lot of research now that shows that being on dating apps, especially certain dating apps, ‎Grindr is a really bad one for this. I think it’s like one of the worst, but being on dating apps, especially swipe dating apps can increase depression and anxiety for a lot of people because of the dehumanization that occurs. The key to practical safety in online dating always is to remember that you're talking to strangers.CLICK TO TWEETThis is actually particularly true in some ways for people of color, and there’s been powerful, powerful documentation of that. Could you just talk about how people can protect themselves emotionally in that way, from the kind of anxiety and depression that come from just being treated in dehumanizing ways? Yeah. I think this is a tricky part of dating, right, because we’re all being put into boxes. The way that the algorithms work is we get put into boxes. I am definitely feeling it as a 37-year-old female, right? Someone, I had a conversation just this week where someone was saying, “The power has changed when you were a 27-year-old female. You had power over men as a straight female.” Now, I’m in a zone where I clearly, if I want to have kids, it needs to happen soon. The guys know that the power is in their court, and so it is interesting and it affects lots of people in lots of different ways. As you mentioned, people of color, particularly women of color, really suffer from this, particularly dark-skinned black women are treated appallingly on dating apps because of fetishism, and because a lot of the apps allow you to filter based on race even within the black community. I know there’s a lot of racism internally with darker skin and these concepts, basically these awful concepts, that society has put on us that everyone needs to be a blue-eyed, blonde-haired bikini model. There’s a lot to unpick in society and there’s a lot then manifests itself when you start to give people boxes that they can take and say, “When people start thinking they have a choice and people start deconstructing people to a list of age, hair color, skin color, eye color, in a way that you wouldn’t actually do if you met someone at the bar, right. If I walk up to you in a bar, you can’t tell how old I am within probably a fifteen-year age gap. I wouldn’t be. I know I can’t age people within at least ten years, right? I don’t walk around with an age label on my head, and one of the things to remember, if you are feeling like you are being marginalized on these apps is you are not being rejected. The reality is you’re just not being seen because of the way these filters work, people aren’t even seeing you. I saw that firsthand when I turned from 29 to 30 on dating apps because suddenly, I had the exact same photos, right, because they were all about six months old. It was all that had changed. It’s literally within a day, I had ticked over a decade and suddenly, I wasn’t appearing in filters anymore. People had filtered me out. Quite often, men my own age filtered me out. I really noticed literally overnight, the drop in attention that I was getting. You can’t take it personally because what’s actually happening is you are ticking a box that someone else hasn’t ticked. They’re not looking at your picture and saying, “No, I don’t want her because she’s too old or she’s too ugly or he’s too camp or whatever you’re worrying about.” It’s not even got that far. It will be that they haven’t even seen you in the first place. It’s remembering that I think, and then I think it’s also really remembering that these tools should, all these tools should be is a form of introduction. They are not telling you your worth by any stretch. This is not a tool to measure your attractiveness to the opposite sex, for example. Dating apps are not a replacement for real-life interaction. They are just an opportunity to cast your net a bit wider, and maybe meet people who you wouldn’t meet in your neighborhood or in your bar or at work. I think it’s making sure that you frame it correctly in your head, because I think if you try and see it as a replacement for society or some value of your worth and you’re counting your own worth on how many matches you’re getting in a night, no one wins from that kind of thinking and you see that. There are definitely people, and this is one of the things that really angers me about people’s use of dating apps. I love dating apps. I don’t like the way people use dating apps. One of the things that really upsets me is when people who are not single-use dating apps to, “Let’s see how many people like me.” For example, and I’ve heard married couples doing this, right, where both partners go on an app, like as many people as they can, and then they compete to see who gets the most reciprocal likes. They have no intention of communicating with those people, and they’re just leading people on. You see it a lot, right? There’s nothing that dating apps can do. The dating apps can’t ask, “I need proof that you’re single.” What are you going to do? “Please prove that you didn’t have a marriage license.” It’s really tricky and you have to trust people. I think that it’s just worth remembering that people, we know this not just from dating. We know this from the whole online world. People are not their best selves when they’re behind a screen, and they think they can get away with something that they can’t get away with in real life. It’s just remembering that, right? That’s a really wonderful filter right there. If someone, even in that dehumanizing environment, still is human, still is kind, still is connected, extra brownie points for them because that’s really a sign, because you’re walking up a down escalator in order to do that. That’s a real mark in your favor. In developing our app, I did a lot of research and learn just such amazing things like for example, some huge percentage of college men never have an intention when they’re on dating apps to even hook up. They don’t even want to talk. They just want to see how many people, it’s like a boredom relief and a kind of self-confidence booster. There is literally no intention to even hook up or even speak. That’s like a shocking thing. I think that dating apps have been built brilliantly to generate matches, but terribly to create an environment of intimacy, and I think that has to change. I’d love to hear your thoughts on that too, like what can dating app creators do to create more humanity, to create more humanization? I’d love to hear any of your thoughts, dreams and reflections of what could be. I think it’s quite tricky because the reality is that for a successful dating app, you need numbers, and the way to have numbers is not to restrict your audience too much, right? Anytime you add any form of filter onto that audience, whether it’s sexuality, whether it’s age, whether it’s something more niche like an app for people with a certain type of hobby or religion, you are already filtering down a group that is already filtered because you’re already starting from a point that everyone has to be single, and so the group becomes smaller and smaller.

  In reality, for me, the ideal dating apps would be ones that made very clear what the intention is that you get on the app, but the minute you start doing that, and I think that it’s tricky because a lot of people won’t admit their intention. I use Bumble and Tinder quite predominantly, and there’s an option where when it asks you what you’re looking for, so many guys say, “I’m not sure. Actually, I want a relationship,” or is that, I don’t want to say I want to hook up because there’s an option to say both of those things. Then you’re kind of working out where in the middle are they and it’s interesting. For me, it angers me that that’s even an option. I’d rather just it be binary and they had to answer it so at least you knew where they stood. I’ve heard lots of stories that people are saying, “Actually, I met with someone who said, ‘I don’t know what I’m looking for.'” They ended up being in a relationship and they almost had to nudge them over the line. My most recent date, which was sort of about two, three weeks ago. I went on a date with a guy who it turns out had been very recently single, like literally had separated from his partner of fourteen years, and they’d been separated a month. I sat on the date and the first thing I said was, “I don’t think you really should be dating. I think you just need a friend and maybe, please don’t go on multiple more dates with more women and put more women in these situations.” It was really interesting because he genuinely, he seemed really quite put out that he had been dating on Tinder, and in his head as a married person who had only ever heard about Tinder, he thought Tinder, I’ll be frank. The way he described Tinder to me felt like free prostitution. He just thought it was an opportunity to just go on there and get lots of sex. He seemed genuinely shocked that he was matching with educated women between the ages of 35 and 45 and we wanted relationships. It was so interesting, that was how he perceived this app. This is a smart guy who clearly has lots of friends who are women between 35 and 45. We both went to the same university. We’d both gone to Cambridge University. This is a smart guy and you kind of think, “Look at your circle of friends. If you’re picking girls on this app that would have been in your circle of friends, why would their intentions be any different to the people that you already know?” I think it’s tricky because Tinder’s not going to advertise saying it’s the relationship app, right, because it would suddenly narrow down as numbers, but the reality is and the reason that I still date on it as someone who does want a long-term relationship is it’s the app that everyone’s heard of. You know that if someone is just testing the water in terms of dating apps, that will be one of the first ones they go on because they’ve heard of it. Because eight years ago, their friends did actually have formed relationship on it. It is quite a tricky one because you need the numbers to be a good experience and to have a choice, but in order to attract the numbers, you can’t be too picky and you can’t, as an app founder, you don’t want to be too restrictive in who you’re letting on the app. That’s a really fascinating thing is what is the win-win between humanity and numbers? What’s the way that there can be a win-win there? I think that playing that game in between draws numbers but creates a lot of pain. With Lumen, we knew that we were restricting ourselves immediately by putting that age limit on, right? You have to be at least 50 to join Lumen, and we knew we were really restricting that and our investors kept saying to us, “Why don’t you lower the women to 40?” I was really adamant that, “No, the whole reason we were creating it is that women of a certain age were having a real issue being overlooked by men that are their own age,” and that doesn’t start at 50. I’ll be completely frank with you. I think it starts about 25. Like, literally there’s a point really early on where men suddenly start looking for younger women and the guys at  OkCupid did a lot of research on this. I think it’s basically 22 is the ideal age for a woman for men of any age, which is kind of insane. I saw it firsthand at Lumen. I had men in their 80s trying to chat me up through my customer service profile, and they were literally over 50 years older than me, but it’s interesting. What happens is the older that women get, the larger the age gap the men the same age as them are trying to date on. Absolutely. Absolutely, yeah. It’s described almost like an island of women in this book by Christian Rudder. He is the Founder of OkCupid. It’s these women who have just basically been forgotten by their own age group, and so that was why we started Lumen. We knew that not every man over 50 wants to date a 30-year-old. There are men in their 50s who want to date other women in their 50s. By putting that age limit, and the whole point was that we were going to say to these women, “Look, if you come on our app, these men know you’re over 50, and that you’re not going to get overlooked.” The one thing I will say though is that if you are a really attractive guy, you know you can get younger women. What would happen is the caliber of the women, if I’m being completely frank, the caliber of the women would be a lot higher than the caliber of the men, and then the women would complain about the caliber of the men. You were like, “Well, we’ve got the men who want you. Can you actually meet up with them and see if there’s more than just their photos?” It’s really interesting, right, because people would ask me really early on, “Are older people less picky when it comes to things like looks. No, no one changes. People are not products in real life, but the way that we see dating apps start to dehumanize people.CLICK TO TWEETHonestly, from the age of 25, we’re all the same. We all use apps in the same way, in the same way that I was saying that there are people looking for hookups on Tinder. People in their 80s were still looking for hookups on Lumen, right? No one changes their attitude that much and no one realizes how old they are. If you asked me off the cuff how old I was, I’d probably say 26 before I remember that I’m 37. If you ask a 70-year-old how old they are, they’re probably still feeling 35 until they remember. We grow up but we don’t, and I think people don’t really change that much regardless of their age. I’ve kind of devoted a lot of time to this because I think that we are victims of terrible information, and we’re given these breathtakingly sophisticated tools to meet, and no education on the real skills of intimacy, which are the true skills of dating. I just want to say that I think people can learn, and I think that the apps can even teach people, but that’s a very difficult and complex thing, but I think we tend to go for a least common denominator and that has really, really hurt us. In my work, just like you, I can’t tell you how many women have talked about this as being such an issue. The men want women who are dramatically younger than them. They are like kids in a candy store so often. They just want to have fun. They feel like they can. Women are looking for more serious relationships, and almost like men of that age become more immature in some ways than they were in earlier years. I would just love to hear kind of your biggest learning for that population. I agree. I think particularly people have come out of a long-term relationship, I think a lot of the men are like, “I’m done. I’ve done that. I don’t need that again. What are my options?” I think it’s one of those things that’s almost become a cliché, but because it’s become a cliché, people then go, “It worked for other people so why shouldn’t I try and do this?” The thing that surprised me the most actually was the way that over 50’s date, men and women, particularly if they are post-divorce or widowed, is if they’ve been married for a long period and they’ve had kids and they’ve done the cohabitation, the thing that actually surprised me was that the type of relationship often they were looking for was more like a teenage relationship where you don’t live with the other person. You just catch up with them a couple of times a week, right, and go to the cinema, and have that more social life with them. The reason for that is they’ve got their own worlds. They’ve spent 50, 60 years building this world that they love. They love their apartment or their house. Why should they bring a stranger into that place? I thought it was quite interesting this idea that when in you’re in your late 20s, early 30s, it’s all about building that shared world with someone. Whereas by that point, they’re like, “No, my world is built. I’m happy. I like my world. I’ve got a space in it for someone on a Tuesday night to go to the cinema with me, and on a Friday night to go to the jazz bar or whatever they want to do.” They’re looking for someone to fill quite a different role, I think at that age, but that’s not for everyone but that definitely was the thing that surprised me.

Advice On Online Dating

Yeah. That’s so interesting and that does happen a lot and of course, there are so many people who are older, who are looking for a deeply committed, connected, live-in relationship but these are things that are all true and all really different. What advice would you give women in that situation? Let’s say over 50, very aware of kind of what a buyer’s market is for men, how much immaturity there is out there, but who still have hope that there are great guys who are looking for someone like them. What’s your best advice for those women? What are the three key things that you would want to say to them as they enter the world of online dating? Yes, at first, I would say, be really honest. Be really honest about who you are. Don’t lie about your age. Don’t put filters on your photo. When I was at Lumen, honestly, I can’t tell you the filters that people are trying to put in their photos. We could see it because you have to selfie verify to join the app. We would see what people’s selfies looked like, and sometimes they look 30 years younger in the pictures that they were trying to upload to the app. There’s no point doing that if you want to meet someone in person. Why would you want your first impression in real life to be one of disappointment? Be honest about who you are. Can I just pause here with a question? Somebody is, they really, really look fifteen years younger than their age. They look twenty years younger than their age and they feel like, “I’m going to lower my amount of people that are interested in me because they judge me by the number age, and not how they would see me when they actually see how I look,” and they struggle with that. I know very, very integrity-based people who change their age from that. Tell me what you think about that. I mean, you’re starting on a lie and also a very good friend of mine is Maria Avgitidis who’s one of the leading matchmakers in New York, and every Wednesday, she does Ask the Matchmaker on Instagram where she answers these questions. Someone asked that exact question this week. They were like, “I look seventeen years younger so I’m calling myself this age.” She replied saying, “I’ve just looked at your pictures. You don’t look that age.” I think that’s the tricky thing. People think they look a certain age. I mean, how do you decide what age you actually look? In reality, again, you’re setting yourself up for a really awkward conversation at some point. You’re either going to turn up and they think that immediately they’re like, “That person lied about their age.” Even if you do actually look the age, I mean, why would you want to pretend to be that much younger? If they’re matching with, it depends, doesn’t it? If it’s someone actually your age who then is like, “You’re same age as me. I thought you were fifteen years younger. I will still carry this on.” I mean, one of the reasons the age is important is in terms of social shared jokes and shared cultural references, right? The reason I wouldn’t date someone fifteen years younger than me is most of my cultural references won’t make sense to them, and this is why it blows my mind when people try to date someone who is significantly younger than them, because I kind of think, “You need to be in that shared space.” A big part of partnership is actually just being in the same place in your life and understanding each other’s lives, right? I think that by lying about your age, then it’s going to get very confusing if you all having to try and pretend that you’re fifteen years younger when you don’t understand half of the references. Good point. I mean, I think that there are intergenerational relationships that work wonderfully, and it’s a spice for people that they’re like entering a new land of the other person’s culture, but I think the point that you’re making, it’s almost like a metaphor for a mistake people make in dating which is, “I’m going to be what I think you want,” and then ultimately you’re going to have to see that that’s not who I am. That’s my interpretation of what you wanted. I’ve wasted a lot of time finding someone who’s not looking for someone like me.

  I think one of the big parts about growing up is becoming comfortable in your own skin, right, and realizing who you are. For me, and this is why I’m still single and I say this, “I’m not going to settle. I’m not going to settle to someone that doesn’t match who I am, and I’m not going to pretend to be something that I’m not to try and attract someone. I could have easily married some millionaires when I was at Cambridge if I had quite happily not had an opinion and tucked under someone’s arm. That’s never going to happen in a million years with me, right? I could be far richer if I hadn’t been outspoken for the last fifteen years, but I have and I’ve got opinions. I like my opinions and I like firing off opinions. I like the banter, of debating stuff with a partner and actually feeling like an equal in a partnership. I think it’s really vital to be yourself. Being yourself is my first advice to these over 50 ladies. My second piece of advice is to give the other person a chance. For a start, men’s profile, and I can tell you this because I saw thousands of them. I saw what women looked like and I saw the dating profiles. Men are really bad at creating dating profiles. They do not know how to sell themselves. They don’t know how to take pictures, whereas women go the opposite direction and almost market themselves too well. Men are appalling marketeers for themselves. A lot of them won’t admit it. One of the reasons I realized that this is the case. Women will enlist the help of friends. Friends will take their pictures. Friends will tell them what a good picture is. They’ll tell them what sounds good in their profiles. Men don’t want to admit to their friends that they’re online dating, and so they try and take the pictures themselves. They have five photos that all look exactly the same, taken at the same time and place. Normally an angle on their chin, then you can’t see their face or it’s really badly lit or they’ve got sunglasses on or they’ve got hats on them. You can’t actually see their face. Men don’t realize how to make themselves look not just good, but just look like themselves. This is something that I was constantly telling the women on Lumen, “Please don’t be too picky. Give these people a chance. Meet them in real life. Have a video call.” A fifteen-minute video call, you’re going to get a feel of whether actually someone does look exactly like the pictures or whether they actually did themselves an injustice with the images that they chose. Yeah. I kind of say that all the time is like when it comes to character, be even more fiercely discriminating. When it comes to things like that, soften your focus a little bit to see. Yeah, really true but I think what you just said about men is probably not so true about gay men, right? No, and I was thinking that as I was saying it. They were straight men. I think gay men know how to market themselves definitely. It’s the straight men who don’t. It’s the straight men who won’t admit they’re dating online I think. My third point is just really on general safety, particularly with women. Women over 50 are the most targeted by scammers, so really keep your wits about you, and that includes things like asking to do a video call really early on to see that they are the person in their photos, and asking to meet up in real life and again, in a public place and in a nice safe place. If someone starts giving you excuses why they can’t meet up with you in real life like they’ve suddenly left the country, which particularly at the moment is questionable, right? Back in the day, one of the main excuses that scammers would use is that they were in the military and they were abroad for the military. I think really, really keeping your wits about you. If the app that you’re using offers verification. With Lumen, we would use these selfies to make sure that they were the person in their photos, and some of the apps will offer verification with ID. RealMe, who is the company that I work with at the moment, what they do is that they actually offer the apps. They don’t work with consumers. They work with apps and they allow the apps to do things like background check people, and tell you if someone has a criminal record or if someone has lawsuits pending against them. There are different levels of this verification and the information that you can get about someone, but even if the app that you’re using doesn’t offer those things yet, be smart. Go off their site and google that person. I do this regularly. If someone tells me, “This is my job,” well then I’ll go on LinkedIn and I’ll check their name and their job just to see actually this lines up and they’re telling the truth. It is very hard these days to not have some kind of online paper trail about yourself and I’m quite open with guys that I’m matching with. If I can’t find much about them, then I’ll just say to them, “Sorry, can you tell me your surname?” I know that if you type “Charly,” the way I spell it, if you type that in on Google with “dating” or with “journalist” or even with my university probably, my profile will come up. It’s so easy for them to find out who I am before we meet in real life so why shouldn’t I have the tools to find out who they are? If they don’t want that and they don’t like that, for me that’s a red flag. No one should be ashamed of who they are to go on a date. What are they going to do if I’m going on a date with them? Why would they not want to tell you their full name? I just find it bizarre. Absolutely. Yeah, and on a character level, that applies also, like really keeping an eye out. How does the person talk to you? Are they a little bit rude? Did you hear them yelling out to somebody in an insulting way like to the delivery person or to whatever? Really watch for those signs because I think we really underestimate that, too and then emotionally, we end up getting really hurt when we deny those warning signs or ignore them. I guess that’s really true all around and I think this way of framing it, remember this is a stranger. Remember this is a stranger. Even if that person was referred to you by someone else you know, this person is still a stranger. I think that real-life quality like you mentioned, I think that’s so important. I’ve heard a lot of people over the last eighteen months falling in love with someone over Zoom calls. I’m sorry but until you are in the same room as them, you can’t smell them. There are the pheromones, there are things like that that you’re not going to realize if you’re attracted to do them properly until you’re in the same room, but also how they talk to other people is so vital if. If you feel like your mental health is starting to decline and you’re drained, take a step away.CLICK TO TWEETThe minute you sit down in the restaurant with them, if they’re rude to the waiter, you’re suddenly going to view them so differently to when you’ve been one-on-one with them for the last eighteen months on Zoom. People behave really differently in different settings, and I think it’s really important almost to test the water, right? If you’re planning different dates, plan dates where you’re going to see that person in different situations. I am a big fan of escape rooms. I have been for years and I quite often go on first dates in escape rooms because that is seeing someone in their emergency mode, right, in a high pressure, stressful and seeing how they react, right? If they’re shouting at me and losing it, then that’s not someone I want to be in a relationship with, and I love when I say this is a bit of a litmus test. It really is and you start to see what people are like under pressure. Some of the best dates I’ve been on have been ones where something has gone wrong, and then you see how that person reacts to that thing going wrong like the tickets they booked were for the wrong day or they can’t get a table at the restaurant they wanted to. Seeing how someone reacts when stuff isn’t perfect. If you want to have a relationship with someone, then you need to know that when things go wrong, that they’re still someone that you like. Otherwise, again, it’s a red flag.

Charly’s Fire

It’s so essential. My dear friend, Hara Marano who’s the editor–at-large of Psychology Today says there are three Cs when it comes to making a choice about the relationship. The first is character, the second is character, and the third is character, and I really agree with that. Charly, you’ve shared so many wonderful things, and I have one other question for you. You are obviously someone who gets on fire about different things. You’re obviously so passionate about different subjects. You’re an entrepreneur and you’re an athlete and you’re visionary and you’re a humanitarian. What these days is kind of like giving you the most fire? What’s the thing that you’re kind of most excited about in your life, your work life, your personal life? What’s the most exciting to you now? It’s quite a big question, isn’t it. What am I most excited about at the moment? I’m a massive feminist. I’m a huge feminist. Anyone that’s watching the video of this recording, I have a big picture of Ruth Bader Ginsburg behind me who I just think is the world’s most incredible woman, and there are lots of Brits who have never heard of her. Literally, her entire story, I find so inspirational. I think for me, the thing that’s getting me most excited is really seeing equality in action. I think we are getting to a point. I mean, we’re still not there and this isn’t just women. This is the whole LGBTQ community. It does feel like in the last five years, we’re really starting to see steps have been formed in terms of equality, and particularly racial equality in the last year with everything that’s happened in the States. I feel like there are conversations happening that weren’t happening even twelve months ago, and I think that it’s awful the situations that have happened to get us to this situation where we’re actually talking about things. What I like is that these topics are repeatedly coming up first and foremost. I don’t know if anyone follows soccer. I’m not a football fan. Obviously, Britain is huge for its football but the British team, the English team have been taking a knee in the tournament, and you’ve got some of our politicians refusing to watch the football because they’re so offended by it. I mean, they are racist. I’m sorry. You’re a racist if you’re that offended by someone taking a knee, but it’s really interesting because the main demographic that watch that sport in the UK are not educated. They’re not people who will have these conversations about racial equality. They’re not people who this would have been a topic on the agenda for, but they see their idols taking a knee and I can’t stand football, but actually something like that, I just think is so powerful because these are not people who listened to scholars or politicians. They don’t tune into radio broadcasts talking about these topics but they’re tuning into the football. They’re coming away and talking about race. At the moment, obviously, this is where we’re recording in two days’ time during the European final. The team that has got to that final, I think 8 out of the 11 would not be on the team if it weren’t for immigration and that’s a huge deal. As they say in Hamilton, “Immigrants, we get the job done.” I say that as a half Romanian Brit and I love that. I love that people are saying, “Look, all these racist people in my country who were voted for Brexit in the last five years are suddenly going, “Hang on. Actually, we need Europeans in this country because we wouldn’t have a football team without them.” That’s what I’m passionate about actually is working out, how do you inform people who are not as well-educated, who are not as well-informed? Because I feel like we live in an age where and we’ve seen this with the elections on both sides of the Atlantic where the uneducated and the misinformed can be really used as tools by nasty higher powers. Actually, finding ways to communicate with them on Cambridge Analytica or on Facebook, and finding ways to show them simple messages, that for me is really powerful. Taking the knee at sports events is a way to do that. That’s wonderful. You know, for me, it’s just been such a painful polarization to witness in my country, and hearing this perspective of people’s having their eyes opened who wouldn’t have otherwise, that’s very reassuring to me and I haven’t thought of it in that way. Thank you for that. It’s tricky, isn’t it? Because we live in our own bubbles. I imagine you live in a very similar liberal bubble to the one that I live in where our social media becomes an echo chamber because you’re only hearing stuff that you believe, too. We saw this really happen 4 or 5 years ago with the Brexit vote, where everyone that was voting to stay in the EU just thought that would be a landslide vote because that’s all we had heard and seen, and then suddenly on the day, it was 48% of the country believed the same as I did and 52 did not. Even if those 52 didn’t necessarily know what they were voting for, it was heartbreaking. It really was and I think that was the first time that a lot of my generation, in particular, really realized, “Hang on, we’re living in this echo chamber.” Particularly, I live in London. I live in the capital city. We’re in this very liberal bubble and the rest of the country does not believe the same as we do, and I think that’s been a real eye-opener.

  Yeah, joining hands with you across the ocean. Absolutely true. It’s so profound. Thank you for bringing your humanity and your passion, and your spark to all of these different subjects. This was just wonderful and helpful. I want to ask, how can people who want to follow you, follow your passions, follow the projects that you’re doing? How can they learn more about you, stay in touch with you, and follow you? My two main platforms are Twitter and Instagram. I’m @CharlyLester on Twitter. Charly is spelled C-H-A R-L-Y. I think I’m @Charly.Lester on Instagram because I couldn’t get the same handle on the two platforms but I’m pretty easy to find, to be honest, as I’ve realized whenever I’ve gone on a date. That’s wonderful and all of that, all the links are going to be in the transcript as well. It was a joy connecting with you, and if there are any last words you want to share with our listeners and viewers, what would those be? One of the things I mentioned early on is this RealMe product, right? This is a team of people I’ve been doing some work with, and they are trying to change the dating industry from the inside really by trying to demand that dating apps include more safety. I think as users, if you are feeling unsafe with a dating app, with a dating site, speak out, like literally go to the founders. Go to the company and say, “Look, I want to be doing more.” That doesn’t obviously have to be just using RealMe. There are lots of different safety options out there, but if you’re not seeing safety provisions on a dating app or site that you’re starting to see on other sites, speak out about it because our love life, it’s not just our love lives that they’re looking after. It is on safety. I say that as a consumer, right, as someone using these apps too. If there’s something that you want, go to the providers and say, “Look, I don’t feel safe because of this. I want you to do more background checks. I want you to offer me a blue verified check so I know someone is who they say they are.” Because I feel like they make a lot of money from us as consumers so we have the power in numbers, right? As I was saying earlier, if they don’t have us in numbers, they don’t have a product. The dating apps need you as dater to tell them what you want from them. Beautiful. That’s wonderful advice. Thank you for everything, Charly, and it was great to have you on the show. Thank you so much. It’s been a pleasure. Bye, everyone.

Important Links:

• Charly Lester
• Deeper Dating
• DeeperDating.com
• The Dating Awards
• Lumen
• Survivors Manchester
• RealMe
• DeeperDatingPodcast.com
• Maria Avgitidis
• Hara Marano
• Ruth Bader Ginsburg
• @CharlyLester – Twitter
• @Charly.Lester – Instagram

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In this Deeper Dating Q& A episode, listeners bring their most important questions about love, sex, dating, and relationships to Ken and get his direct personal advice. Today, we’ll talk about really liking someone, but still feeling blocked, what to do when you and your partner have different life goals, building a family of creation with friends, how to develop self-love, and much more. —

Table of Contents

• The Evolutionary Process Of Self-Honoring
• Understanding Our Inner Restrictions
• Finding And Building Community As A Single Person
• Finding The Balance In A New Relationship
• The Interdependence In Loving The Self And Others
• The Joys Of Experiencing Our Core Gifts

Deeper Dating Q&A: Expert Advice For All Your Questions About Love, Dating And Sex

Welcome to The Deeper Dating Q and A, where I answer your most pressing personal questions about love and sex, and intimacy, in a way that will help you apply these insights to the particulars of your own love life, and hopefully, leave this episode with new insights and revelations about your own journey, so stay tuned to the Deeper Dating Podcast. — Hi, everyone, and welcome to the Deeper Dating Podcast. I’m so happy to have you join me. I’m Ken Page and I’m a psychotherapist, the author of Deeper Dating, and the Cofounder of DeeperDating.com, a site where single people can meet in an online environment that’s fun, inspiring, kind and respectful. In this podcast, I’m going to be answering your personal questions that you call into me. In this and every episode, I’m going to share the greatest tools that I know to help you find love and keep it flourishing, and heal your life in the process, because the skills of dating are the skills of love, and the skills of love are the greatest skills of all. If you want to learn more about the deeper dating path to real intimacy, just go to DeeperDatingPodcast.com. You can sign up for my mailing list, get free gifts, and learn a lot more about how to use these ideas to transform your own intimacy journey. I also want to say everything I share in this podcast is educational in nature. It is not medical or psychiatric advice or treatment. Finally, if you like what you’re learning here, I would love it if you could subscribe and leave me a review. Just this week, I’ve gotten the most beautiful reviews from people, so thank you so much for that. The meat and potatoes of beautiful intimacy work is learning to work without walls.CLICK TO TWEET

The Evolutionary Process Of Self-Honoring

So let’s jump in. Someone, who I’m going to call L, for the first letter of their name, called in and asked me this question. She said that she had to take care of her paraplegic father herself as a child, as well as raise her younger children, and she’s a very caring person, but she does not want to have children, but her boyfriend does have children, and this is a real dilemma for her, and she called in to ask how to handle this situation. I want to use this question to talk about all of those kinds of situations that we enter into where we meet somebody who’s really wonderful, really lovely, but there are things that are difficult. Maybe it’s a physical thing, a part of them that you’re just so not attracted to, or maybe it’s their politics, or maybe it’s that they have children and you don’t want children, or they don’t want children and you do want children. Any of these kinds of things that it’s just kind of so universal this experience. My broad general comment is this. Love is built to turn us inside out, to help us become the people we are meant to be, but that does not mean losing our authentic truth, and what’s right for us and what isn’t right, and both of those things are true, and both need to be honored. This is a kind of evolutionary journey. I’ve worked with so many people who I have just deeply respected their ability to hold both sides of this. The part that said, “No, this is not right for me,” and the part that said, “I’m falling in love with this person. I’m having these really deep feelings, and I love this person, or I’m growing to love this person, or so much is right that I have never had be right before in a relationship. What do I do?” I want to say that the people whose kind of process I’ve honored and appreciated, and respected the most are the people who hold both of those truths, and stay in the presence of the relationship until an answer becomes clear, because what’s going to happen is over time, one of those sides will become ascendant. Either the person will become more beautiful, the relationship will become more beautiful, to the point where you say, “I’m going to give up this expectation or this want,” or that expectation or want will become so clear and feel really true that you know it’s not going to work, but love teaches us and trains us, and so often things that we think were not going to be what we want, and I am not talking about character issues because character is everything. Emotional safety is everything. I’m talking about things like them having children or not having children.

  What I would say is stay in this, honor both sides, as crazy-making as that is. Talk to people who you love and trust, and just be present in the relationship with both waves. The wave of, “I can’t do this,” and the wave of, “Oh my God, I really like this person.” That beautiful evolutionary process of self-honoring, but where honoring the beauty of the relationship, will ultimately make things clearer for you. It’s a scary and rocky journey, but it’s a journey of truth and it’s an important journey.

Understanding Our Inner Restrictions

Someone else left a message talking about an experience where she has found an attraction of inspiration. She’s been with this guy like five times, and there’s a kindness, a decency. She feels like she could be herself. She’s allowed to be who she is. There’s a feeling of real freedom, deep connection, mutual respect, and she’s celebrating that, and I am celebrating that with you. That is just wonderful, but she says that there’s a feeling of internal pressure that she’s experiencing that is very uncomfortable. She describes it as a sense of inner restriction. She says this guy is attractive, but she’s not insanely wildly crazy attracted to him. He definitely is attractive, but she feels the sense of inner restriction. She knows that this is probably internal stuff and she’s beginning therapy, three cheers. That is wonderful to explore this more fully. In her journey, she decided to be honest with this guy because she felt this blockage and she wanted to be authentic. She talked about this inner restriction that she was feeling. She told him that she was attracted to him and interested in him, and wanted to continue, but there was this inner restriction sense that was holding her back. He kind of pulled back after that, but they are still seeing each other. She’s concerned that she might have hurt him, that she might have hurt the relationship. Did she do the right thing by mentioning this? Even more, what to do from here on? The same lessons for deep friendship apply to deep romantic love, which is to look for the people with whom your soul feels safe.CLICK TO TWEETI think that that phrase “an inner sense of restriction” is a very powerful one and says a lot. Maybe some of you who are listening relate to those words, an inner restriction. I think that I just want to honor you for doing what you did because you needed to do that to stay real with him. I’m very curious, too, if as he began to distance himself a little bit, if you started feeling more attracted and interested, because that’s kind of a sign that this might be what I call the wave of distancing, which is what happens when we’re with an available, kind, decent person, and we’re just not used to that. That has affected decades of my life until I learned how to work through that, which I talk about in other podcast episodes. The other piece that I would say is “inner restriction.” What part of your body do you feel the restriction in? I want to say that the meat and potatoes of beautiful intimacy work is learning to work with our walls. That’s like the greatest thing of all, is to learn the language of our walls, so that we can begin to deconstruct them and protect ourselves in more conscious ways. A question here that I would love you to be able to ask yourself is this, what does that inner restriction say? What are its words if you’re going to put words on it? What part of you is it restricting? What does it need to feel better? And then some more nitty-gritty questions. When you’re with this guy, what stuff triggers that sense of inner restriction? What stuff happens that doesn’t trigger that feeling that lets you be free from it? This is a super new relationship, and you’re learning whether that sense of inner restriction is an important message of self-protection, or quite likely if it is the wave and it’s just fear, but listen to the words of the inner restriction. Let it tell you what it needs, what it wants and so important, how it wants to be handled, how it wants to be touched, how it wants to be interacted with.

  I think the greatest error in our intimacy journey is to just take these places where we just can’t, or where we have walls, or where we’re just frightened and condemn ourselves, instead of saying, “Let me unknot this, let me unravel this, let me explore this,” because it is those exact knots where our deepest gifts lie underneath that we have not yet learned how to protect. Asking those questions is so rich, and if this applies to any of you in any different way in your relationships, and it should apply to a lot of you, coupled or singled. You might even pause the recording and just take a minute and say, “What does my inner restriction say? What is it asking for? How does it need to be treated?” These are like the liberating questions that we are not taught to ask.

Finding And Building Community As A Single Person

The next question is just such a wonderful and important one. It is from Barbara and she is 42, and she was very thankful about the work that I teach. Thank you, Barbara. She talked about wanting to build a kind of community, friendship and family, and connection as a single person. She talked about how hard that has been to do because the people she knows often don’t have time for that level of connection. She said, “You know, I do a lot of different social things, but that feeling of family is not there. That’s a very empty and sad place for me and something that’s really important for me to have. Do you have any ideas or any thoughts about that?” I have a lot of ideas and thoughts about that because it’s something I have lived through a lot. This is one thing I think. I think that the same lessons for deep friendship are the lessons of deep romantic love, which is to look for the people with whom your soul feels safe. There could be a lot of wonderful people, but you want to look for that feeling of like, “This person is gold. There is goodness here. There is a decency. There is a caring. There is creativity. There is a deep integrity.” You want to put that first and foremost. When you make that your kind of guide, you are more likely to find that kind of person. It is harder to find that kind of person with someone who is married or in a relationship and has kids. It is easier to find that with single people often, or people with more, more time on their hands. Culturally, we are given an idea of independence that fails us again and again because we are deeply interdependent. It’s a both-end thing.CLICK TO TWEETThat’s a really good and wonderful thing, and so essentially important. What I would say is that it’s not easy, but it is as doable as any other kind of relationship challenge. We learn the skills of getting out there. We notice and think about, “What have our friendships been like? What kind of people have we chosen to follow, to chase, to spend time with? Are these people who’ve deeply met our needs, or historically, are they the people who haven’t?” And then begin to rewire and look for people who are antidotal to what we maybe have done before, people who really can fill our hearts. Those are the lessons that will apply brilliantly in your search for love as well, and is it easy? Is the search for love easy? No. Does it require so much recalibration, so much of reconnecting to our heart, and our wisdom, and our inner sense of discovery, and hitting walls, and finding a way through and trying again? But what I would say to you is look in the arenas where you can find people who also are looking for that sense of family. There are organizations where you’re more likely to find that. Maybe churches or temples, or spiritual paths, or different groups that you could find. Ongoing groups that support community are wonderful ways. These are just some of the thoughts on this journey, but I just want to say this is doable. You can do this. It is preciously important, and it is profoundly connected to your search for love because it’s the same skills.

Finding The Balance In A New Relationship

There was a longish question from someone who asked to be kept anonymous, but it’s a really interesting one and a really good one. It has two parts. The first part is she said that she lost her mom after a long illness when she was only twelve years old. That has made the ambiguity of early relating and early dating incredibly difficult for her, because she just wants to lock things in, to know that her heart is going to be safe, and that’s not appropriate for early dating, and that causes a lot of tension and stress, and just she doesn’t know how to handle that.

  This is the thing that I want to say first. The thing that you don’t want to do in a case like this is to shame yourself and blame yourself, and think you need to act cool. This is a part of your heart and your soul, and your Core Gift that is incredibly profound. She also said she loves the Core Gift work, but this is kind of more the issue that she’s facing at this point. Yes, this part of you is a Core Gift part of you that wants deep connection and safety, so that has to be treasured because here’s what happens. When we have a need that we shame, it turns into neediness, and neediness doesn’t feel good, and it doesn’t act good, and it is unkind to us. So the first thing is to normalize and make room for this ache, this longing, this insecurity, and to be able to talk about it with friends, and to love it and understand it, just to know that this is just part of the stuff that you go through in early relationships. It’s part of the mine fields that you need to learn to map yourself around in terms of how you handle it, but the way to do that is absolutely not to shame yourself, or to tell yourself that you should be someone different. If you can release the pressure by either letting him know in some ways that it would be nice to have some reassurance, or maybe it’s just like you want to reach out and take his hand, but you don’t do that because you think, “Oh, that’s going to look needy, or he’ll interpret that as that I’m insecure,” so then you don’t reach out to hold his hand, and that is when the need shamed turns into neediness and insecurity, and all of those horrible, horrible feelings. One action is often just being bold, just being bold and expressing not even so much their requests, but the generous spirit of wanting to connect in a playful way. The more you can express the essence of that without going through that internal judge and jury that makes you question, “Am I being too much?” The better off you will be, and you might need to share with him in different ways over time, like you’ll need to find ways to ask for what you want, or at other times, you’ll need to reach out to friends to do that, but just know that this is part of your journey. This is like a big hill that needs to be climbed that you absolutely can climb, and can and should and need to develop skills. Those skills are around not shaming yourself, turning the need into a generous reaching out, getting support from friends, and just honoring and treasuring this part of you. So those are just some ideas there. Part two of her questions was about this guy as well, and she said, “He is an attraction of inspiration, just yay to everybody who is doing this work,” and saying, “I’m only going to look for attractions of inspiration, and hence being more likely to find them. I just celebrate that so much,” so yay on that account, and she says, “He also is not that communicative. He has these wonderful, wonderful qualities.” She has a deep sense of kind of trust and a really good sense about him, but he’s not a big sharer. He doesn’t necessarily communicate his feelings. She asks, “I’m a little worried that that is going to end up feeling deprivational to me in the relationship. Does that mean this is not a good relationship, or might it mean that it’s still could be, and we find a way to work around it?” I would say definitely assume the latter if the character pieces are there, if you’re interested in him, and he’s interested in you. I wrote a piece about my husband and I, and I just said, “I’m the feelings channel, like all feelings all the time,” and then I look at Greg and I’m like, “Could I like get a feeling out of you about this?” It’s very, very hard for him, although he’s wonderful at listening to other people, so conceptually, on paper, I would have wondered if this could be a match. I’m like Mr. Therapist, share feelings, but in fact, I feel deeply and essentially held and seen by him, even in his quietness. Not that it hasn’t been hard at different points for both of us, but I would say absolutely, the big question is, what’s the weather like inside of you when you’re with him? What do you feel inside? And if it’s good, warm, gratifying, generative feelings, that says a lot, and a lot can be worked through and around if that is there.

The Interdependence In Loving The Self And Others

There is a group of gay men in the New York area. They’ve created their own self-study group with deeper dating, and I’ve got two questions from that group, and I’m going to share them both because they’re great questions. The first question was around a passage that was on page 90 of my book, which says, “Popular psychology tells us we can only love others if we love ourselves first,” but the real truth is often the other way around. Until we feel seen and loved in the places we’re most vulnerable, few of us will ever be able to fully love ourselves. What he says is he says, “Speaking for myself, I’ve learned in all of these different spiritual disciplines, not to mention RuPaul, that learning to love myself needs to be an internal process that doesn’t rely on whether or not someone else happens to love me for who I am, and that many spiritual practices say this same thing. Can you reconcile these beliefs or explain your position further?” What I would say about that is that culturally, we are given an ideal of independence that fails us again and again because we are deeply interdependent. It’s a “both-and” thing. It is not an “either-or” thing, but the experience in the places where we have the hardest time loving ourselves when we have someone who can look at us and instruct us in the gift part of what we’ve been embarrassed by and ashamed of, there is nothing like that, and the task of doing that on our own is often like pulling yourself up by your bootstraps like you stay up for about one second. It is so true that we need each other to heal. Conceptually beautiful concept, love yourself first, and I am all about learning the skills of loving yourself, and it is an inside job to a really deep degree. That’s so much of what I teach with the Core Gift work, but it’s “both-and.” It is also true that we learn to love ourselves, one, by choosing people who love us in a wonderful way. That’s like maybe the greatest gift of all in our search for love is learning to choose those people. Learning to choose people only with whom our soul feels safe. So the answer here is it is so much more “both-and” than we are taught by popular psychology or many spiritual disciplines, and that’s just my take on this.

The Joys Of Experiencing Our Core Gifts

The next one is around some particular exercises, which are in my book and in my courses, etc. around discovering your Core Gifts, and some of the questions that I ask in that process are, “Recall three times in your life when you felt most deeply inspired, fed, or moved in a relationship with someone,” so this person tells three very, very moving stories that kind of connect to some of the themes that we’ve been talking about in this episode. Three times in his life when he felt very vulnerable, and experienced a lot of pain, a lot of vulnerability, a lot of uncertainty, and was brave enough, first of all, to reach out to someone, even though it was hard and scary, and embarrassing. Wise enough to choose the right people, and blessed enough that he got to have this experience of in each of these cases, really being able to express his grief and his fear, and feel seen and heard, and not diminished in any way, but honored and supported. In this work of discovering your Core Gifts, we ask a series of questions. In the book and in the course, there are questions that we ask. This was under the category of discovering your Core Gifts through your joys. These were the joys that he described and he asked, “Can you give me any feedback? Are these really joys? Are there Core Gifts here in these experiences?” Here’s what I would say. Absolutely, yes. These are all situations where you were brave enough to get in touch with deep grief, trusting and beautiful enough to share it with someone, and then able to receive healing from that. That’s big stuff. Many people or most people in the world can’t do that. I just think that there’s something here about your ability to drink deeply from authentic communication, that probably has gotten you in trouble because it’s a Core Gift and it’s a very strong capacity, and made you feel misunderstood, but also has felt like a key to understanding what works for you in intimacy, because these are the gifts of someone who can share deeply and really receive the experience of being held, which I am quite certain that you’re able to give to other people as well. When we look at the things in our relationships that touch us and move us the most, they’re going to be kind of universal, but they’re also going to be kind of really individual, and out of those, we begin to name our Core Gifts, and I think these are beautiful Core Gifts that you’re describing. I have lots more questions I still need to answer. I will do that on the next Q and A episode. I thank you all for listening. Go to DeeperDatingPodcast.com to join my mailing list, and if you do, the free gift that you’ll get is actually the first two chapters of my book in which you will be able to learn how to discover and name your own Core Gifts. It was a joy to be with everybody, and I look forward to the next episode of The Deeper Dating Podcast with you.

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Your Core Gifts lie at the very heart of your ability to find and nurture generative, beautiful, healthy love. They are the deepest language of your inner self, and the degree to which you value them and understand them is the degree to which you will make wiser, more empowered choices in love—and everywhere else. These three simple, illuminating questions will invite you to a life-changing adventure of self-discovery. —

Table of Contents

• Core Gifts, Explained
• Question For Discovering Your Core Gift

The 3 Questions That Reveal Your Deepest Intimacy Gifts

How To Claim The Power Of Your Core Gifts

How can we use our deepest insecurities to actually discover our greatest inner gifts? Stay tuned to this episode of the Deeper Dating Podcast to learn a formula and a concept that turns everything inside out; that brings meaning, direction, and healing to our lives. — Hello and welcome to The Deeper Dating Podcast. I’m Ken Page and I’m a psychotherapist. I’m the author of Deeper Dating and the co-founder of DeeperDating.com, which is a site where single people can meet in an environment that is fun, inspiring, kind, and respectful. In this episode, I’m going to talk about the central concept in all the work I do, which is the power of your Core Gifts. In this episode and in every episode, I’m going to share the greatest tools that I know to help you find love, keep it flourishing, and heal your life in the process because the skills of dating are nothing more than the skills of intimacy. Those are the greatest skills of all for a happy rich life. If you want to learn more about the deeper dating path to real intimacy, just go to DeeperDatingPodcast.com. You’ll learn about upcoming courses and events, and if you sign up for my mailing list, you’ll also get some free gifts. You’ll learn more about how to use these ideas to transform your own intimacy journey. I also want to say that everything I share in this podcast is educational in nature. It’s not medical or psychiatric advice or treatment. Finally, if you like what you’re learning here, it would be a tremendous gift if you would subscribe and leave me a review. I have gotten the most beautiful reviews and thank all of you who’ve written them. Okay, let’s dive in. We are true artists because we are living from our truth and our capacity for intimate love is profound here.CLICK TO TWEETIf I had to synopsize the most beautiful, liberating, and mysterious insight that I’ve ever learned in my life and in my decades of practice as a psychotherapist, it’s this. It’s that the parts of ourselves that we feel the most timid around, the most vulnerable, the most embarrassed, the most sensitive, the parts where we have the deepest insecurities are actually the path to our greatest gifts, to our genius, to our mission, to our ability to love. The profound mind-boggling formula that I really believe is true is this. The degree to which we treasure, honor, and dignify those gifts is the degree to which we can have a happy life and the degree to which we can find healthy, sustaining relationships. We don’t have to do it perfectly, but the more we learn to do that, the better our relationships become, including our relationship with ourselves, with the world, with spirituality, all of those different kinds of love, and the more we develop a truly secure attachment style. The converse is true as well. I know this so well from my own life. All the ways that I don’t honor and dignify those parts of me are all the ways that I end up in life situations and relationships that are masochistic or painful or not wonderful. It’s a formula of such profundity that until we start with the honoring of I think of it as like the deep inner petals of our being. The beating heart of our humanity, the most intimate part of who we are, and the realest, truest part of who we are. That the secret really to life and to love is the treasuring of those parts of ourselves, but those parts of ourselves have probably gotten us into so much trouble because genius is not easy, and these are our genius places. These are our deep, what I call, Core Gift places.

Core Gifts, Explained

All of the work that I teach rests on the foundation of being able to name, discover, honor, and learn the language of our Core Gifts, and then choose situations, people, passions, and projects that feed that part of ourselves. In this episode, I’m going to teach you how you can discover your own Core Gifts. The kind of key practices, you don’t learn this in a minute, and it’s deeply kind of counterintuitive in some ways, that our greatest insecurities reveal our greatest gifts. These are practices that I’m going to teach you that will enrich your life and shift your kind of experience from that painful, crippling place that we all know so well. Where we are beholden to the eyes of the people who are looking at us and judging us, and shift that to a place where there’s a sense of a sacred self that surprises us, challenges us, challenges the world, and is generative, creative, strange, quirky, and generous. All different kinds of things that don’t necessarily make life easy, but genius domesticated is genius lost, and we need to honor those parts of ourselves.

  In my teaching, in my book, that’s where we begin. In my intensives, which last six months, almost half of the intensive is spent focusing on Core Gifts. I’m very, very excited that I’ve been in contact with and in dialogue with some very renowned researchers who are very interested in this approach and how it changes people’s search for love. We’re talking about developing a real research project and they asked me, “What is the piece of your work that to you is the most important for us to start with?” After thinking not too long, I said, “It is the concept of Core Gifts,” the discovery of, the naming of, the honoring of, the leading with your Core Gifts, and the looking for people who treasure those gifts. That’s the central foundational piece and actually, we’re going to be building, and I’ll talk about this a little bit more later because I’m going to actually be offering a workshop in this. In this episode, I feel like I can give you the essence of these concepts and give you some beautiful, rich, self-honoring practices that will help you begin to treasure and name your Core Gifts even more fully and richly. First, I just want to share an image that I use in teaching this work. It’s just the image of a target. Imagine a target with the number of concentric rings, and that target is a map of your being. The closer you get to the center, to the inside, is the closer you get to the beating heart of your humanity. It’s where you feel things the most deeply. It’s where the greatest meaning lies. It’s where the deepest roots of your being lie. It’s your biggest truth. It’s your place of deepest, dynamic authenticity and truth. When we live from that place, we are true artists because we are living from our truth, and our capacity for intimate love is profound here. Now, this is not all like fun and games in light because it’s a lifetime of work to learn to bear the vulnerability, the intensity, the mystery, and the challenges that these parts of ourselves ask. It’s a holy, holy sacred task, but also because these parts of us are so deep, they’re such deep strata of our being, they’re the places where life touches us the most. They’re also the places where we feel our wounds the most, our pain the most, our compassion the most, our grief the most. Genius domesticated is genius lost.CLICK TO TWEETWe don’t just get to barrel into the very center of our being because there are skills that we need to develop in order to kind of bear and bare the beauty and the intensity of these gifts. It doesn’t happen easily and it doesn’t happen quickly, but it’s an exquisite process. That’s kind of like, in a very concrete level, it’s like you’re in a relationship with someone and you’re having an interchange and something doesn’t feel right, but you tell yourself you’re wrong for feeling that it doesn’t feel right, or you’re being too much or you’re being over-sensitive. When you do that, you tell yourself that you will do one of two things. You will suppress whatever it is that you’re feeling from this deeper place or you’ll act it out in an unhelpful way, or you’ll do both, but let’s say instead, you remember and realize, “Oh, this sensitivity, this thing that I’m feeling, I have to treat it with honor. It is connected obviously to a deep part of myself or I wouldn’t be feeling it. How can I honor it in the relationship?” When we say that and we ask that we begin to learn kinder, more connected ways to share these quirky parts of ourselves as actual gifts. We do it with generosity. We do it with vulnerability. It is scary, but that act of being able to think, what does this part of me want? Then to ask for that in a way that’s engaged and connected, that’s just an act of intimacy greatness that as we grow, we learn to do better and better, and then it’s actually an act of generosity to share those parts of ourselves. Even though it’s hard or embarrassing, it is beautiful. There’s a ring of fire that exists between us and these Core Gifts where we get embarrassed or ashamed, or we think we’re too much, or we think we’re not enough. That kind of coming out of stepping across that ring of fire of embarrassment and awkwardness and saying, “This is who I am,” is one of the most beautiful and affirming things that we can do. It turns out the very things that we thought we wouldn’t be loved for are the things that we end up being loved for the most by the right people. That’s just who created this amazing, amazing journey where we actually had to go inside to the parts that we thought we had to hide, and those are the parts that get celebrated. How incredible is that?

 

Question For Discovering Your Core Gift

I’m going to leave this kind of like very esoteric, theoretical framework now, and I’m going to bring it down to some of these practices that I was talking about. These are some practices, these are questions you can ask yourself that you can ask yourself on a regular basis that will help you discover your Core Gifts. There are two central basic questions and this is an exercise that I teach, which is you can take two days and a journal, a phone, a tablet or anything that you can write in, and for two days, notice two things. Notice the things in your interactions with the world that hurt you, that sting you, that make you feel like you just got a paper cut, or maybe cause even deeper pain than that. Notice those things and don’t step over them so quickly and tell yourself you’re being too sensitive or just try to get rid of the pain and the suffering. Instead, ask yourself, “What hurts? Why does it hurt? Is this a hurt that I have had in my life before? What does this hurt say about what matters most to me? What does this hurt say about the things that are important?” When you answer those questions, you can ask the next question, which is, “What might be the Core Gift in this hurt that I’m experiencing?” You’re probably going to be able to figure out an answer. When you do that over the course of two days, you will find that certain themes emerge. Those themes might be a loss of connection, an unkindness, a lack of generosity, a dishonesty, and a lack of commitment. These are the kinds of things that are like fingerprints, they’re universal but they’re individual for each of us, and you will find the things that hurt and sting the most. I’m going to ask you to think, “How might these come from my deepest gifts?” The second question is, “What things fill my heart?” Like during the day, what are the things that give you a sense of peace or you get this feeling of solidity, strength, clarity, or you get a creative burst? What are the things or you feel a sense of joy or connectedness or love? What are the things, what are the environments that create that for you? With those things, I ask you not to just step over them quickly and think, “Well, that was a nice moment,” but instead to think this is a portal to my deepest roots. How might that be so, if it was so? What is it in me that is being filled with this joy, this piece, or this good feeling? What is it about what’s going on that’s making me feel these good feelings? Have I ever felt these good feelings before? What kind of things have triggered them for me? What does this say about what my Core Gift might be that is getting a little bit of a light shown on it, and it’s illumined at the moment? The happiness that we want in finding love is with someone with whom these parts of us feel safe, feel held, and feel appreciated.CLICK TO TWEETIf you take the time to think in this philosophical way, you will find the key themes that have bewildered you because you’ve said, “Why am I so sensitive? I don’t need to be this sensitive,” or maybe concerned you because the feeling of joy or peace was really great and it just felt odd or strange, and you didn’t know what to do with it. These are portals to your deepest self. When you know those Core Gifts, when you begin to put names on them, and you know, in my book and my work there, you know, I go into a lot more details about how to do that, but even with these practices, you will be able to do that. You begin to notice the themes that matter the most to you. Now, here are some other ways that you can identify your core gift. This is a great one. This is a way to identify your Core Gifts in romantic relationships and it’s this. What do you feel most timid to reveal in bed, in communication? What is the stuff that it’s like, “Oh, this is hard to share. This is hard to share.” I don’t mean experiences that you’ve had in your life that were painful or difficult or embarrassing. I mean parts of you that are just hard to share. Those are your Core Gifts. What it is is that those parts of you have an intense charge. Those are the places where you have the greatest charge because it’s where your greatest genius is. It’s where your mission is. It’s where your deepest language of self lies. The more you learn to treasure these parts of you, the more you will also learn to become so familiar with that horrible feeling of having them stepped on, neglected, denied or ignored, and that’s another act of personal greatness – is to cultivate that dignity to say, “It’s not that I’m not enough, it’s that something is happening here, that to my heart, to my soul, to my being, to my gift just doesn’t feel right. I’m going to figure out what that is, I’m going to trust it, and I’m going to honor it.” The more we do that, for those of us who are single, the more your taste in romantic partners will actually shift. This is an amazing thing. I have done this work with thousands of people and I cannot tell you how many times I have seen that happen. It’s a formula. It’s a beautiful formula that I really believe in.

  I also want to say that I am going to be creating a four-session workshop, helping people discover, name and learn to lead with their Core Gifts in their intimacy journey and in their life as a whole. If you’d like to know more about that, you can just go to the show notes, or you can go to MyCoreGifts.com to learn more. Now, just one other concept. I’ve talked about this a lot, but it comes out of this experience of learning to treasure your Core Gifts, dignify them and lead with them, and it’s this. That in your dating life, in your search for love, in your everything, asking yourself this question, “Do my Core Gifts, does my deep inner self feel safe at this moment?” In your dating life, for those of you who are dating, that is an incredible question to ask. “Do I think that my Core Gifts might feel safe with this being?” If the answer is yes, well, that is a very beautiful thing, and there are, of course, other questions that follow that, including the consistency of that feeling. It’s never going to be perfect because we’re all human, but it needs to be kind of essentially so, but I believe that the happiness that you want and that we want in finding love is with someone with whom these parts of us feel safe, feel held, feel appreciated. Also, that the heat of their challenge is honored and accepted even with all of its quirks or over intensities, and yeah, it’s our responsibility to work on that but in an essential way. We need a partner who welcomes, honors and accepts the challenges of these profound gifts that we have. When you make that kind of the key point of your search, something deep inside feels honored, and something deep inside feels like it can begin to play, dance, be sexual, be flirtatious, be intimate, and be allowed because there’s a sense of safety and authenticity. This work of listening to our Core Gifts is a life work and none of us are perfect at it. We all have clay feet when it comes to doing this kind of work, but the truth is, that the more that we do it, the more our lives become rich and the more our lives work in wonderful ways. Thank you so much for listening to this episode and please go to DeeperDatingPodcast.com and you can click, “Ask Ken.” I want to hear your experiences with these practices. I really would love to hear them. Thank you all and I look forward to connecting again on the next episode of the Deeper Dating Podcast.

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Listen to the podcast here:

Is there chemistry? That’s a necessary question. But the bigger question lies right behind that! Because different types of chemistries lead to different futures. This is why it’s so essential to understand how your “chemistries” have guided your love life. In this episode, we’ll explore which kinds of chemistries to follow–and which to stay away from–for a happy future in love. These insights can change your entire search for love–and empower you to love yourself more deeply! —

Table of Contents

• Simplest Path To Happiness In Finding Love: Ask This Question
• The Sexy But Unsafe Chemistry
• A World Full Of Possible Chemistries

Is There Chemistry? Here’s What You Need To Know

Is there chemistry? That’s a question that we ask ourselves and get asked, but the richer question lies right behind that. What kind of chemistry is there? Because different chemistries lead us into different futures. In this episode of The Deeper Dating Podcast, I’m going to share what kind of chemistries can lead to happiness and what kind of romantic chemistries lead to pain, so stay tuned to this episode. — Hello everybody and welcome to The Deeper Dating Podcast. I’m Ken Page and I’m a psychotherapist, author of the book Deeper Dating, and Cofounder of DeeperDating.com, a site where single people can meet in an online environment that’s respectful, inspiring, kind and fun. Today, I’m going to talk about the different kinds of chemistry there are. The ones to watch out for and the ones to pursue, and the ones to cultivate and grow. In this episode and every episode, I’m going to share the greatest tools that I know to help you find love and keep it flourishing and heal your life in the process. Because the skills of dating are nothing more than the skills of love. Those are the most important skills of all for a happy, rich, meaningful life. If you want to learn more about the deeper dating path to real intimacy, just go to DeeperDatingPodcast.com. You can sign up for my mailing list there. You’ll get free gifts and you’ll learn more about how to use these ideas to transform your own intimacy journey. You’ll also find transcripts of this and every other episode. Now let’s jump in.

  People say all the time, “Well, there was no chemistry” or, “Well, there was chemistry.” As if there’s either chemistry or no chemistry. That’s a really limited understanding of how this works because there are different kinds of chemistry. The first question, appropriately is, “Is there some kind of chemistry?” The next question that has to be asked and is so important for anybody who wants to have a wiser search for love is this, “What kind of chemistry is it?” Because there are different kinds of chemistry and each different of chemistry, if you follow that relationship, is going to lead you down a very different path and into a very different future, and a very different life. The question is not just, “Is there chemistry?” It’s, “Is there chemistry and what’s the nature of that chemistry? What parts of me are engaged in the chemistry of this relationship, and what am I learning about where that’s going to lead me in my future?” We’re going to talk about that today. We’re going to talk about chemistries that are good to choose to follow, and chemistries that aren’t so good to choose to follow. In our culture, there’s a kind of relentless focus on quick matching. Getting the matches and getting it quickly, and getting the matches with the people with whom there is the most obvious and immediate chemistry. What’s troubling about that is the hottest and most immediate chemistry is often to people who your unconscious knows are capable of hurting you in ways you’ve been hurt before, are very capable of not seeing your worth or value fully, and you get engaged in wanting to prove your value to them. These things are not conscious until we make them conscious. This relentless focus on, “Is it a match?” and “Is there chemistry?” just ignores that depth. Then as we get wiser in our search for love, we learn this and we begin to look at it differently. When you have to bend yourself into a pretzel to get the other person to value you, that’s not the kind of chemistry you're looking for.CLICK TO TWEETThat’s why so much of online dating is so skilled at finding and creating matches, but not at creating intimacy. Looking for chemistry and choosing quick chemistry, but not necessarily choosing the kind of chemistry that’s going to lead to happiness. Interestingly, in the field of research, I have learned that there’s a great deal of research on how matches are made about initial attraction and how people match, and what makes them match, but there is dramatically less research on what creates quality matching. What creates matching that can really turn into relationships that can last? There’s some but there’s not a lot because of this focus on this simple definition of chemistry, instead of this richer one that I’m just encouraging all of you to take into account. By the end of this episode, you’ll have done some deep and rich thinking about your different chemistries and what they’ve led you to. You’ll begin to move toward making choices about following the kind of chemistries that really lead to happiness, joy, meaning and peace.

Simplest Path To Happiness In Finding Love: Ask This Question

By knowing the different types of chemistry that there are for you, you will change your future. That is what this work is all about. I’m going to talk first about the kind of chemistries that we want to look for and follow. This is something that I have talked about before. It’s a way that we can have so much more control of our search for love, and it’s by asking ourselves one question as we search for love. Let me tell you, asking this question just makes such a profound difference. It truly, truly, truly is, I think, the kind of simplest path to happiness in finding love, and that is this question and I ask it in a kind of spiritual way. I use the word soul but for you, maybe heart might be more appropriate. The question is, “Does my soul feel safe with this person?”

  Is there a feeling of goodness, of trust, of solidity, of generosity, of consistency? When you make your first question, “Does my soul feel safe with this person?” You are infinitely more likely to choose someone with a lot of goodness inside them, a lot of integrity inside them. Actually, some research has shown, there’s not a lot but there’s some, and some research has shown what are the things that make the difference between somebody just matching for a quick amount of time and actually turning into a relationship, and two huge factors in that are these, that you feel like the other person likes you back, that’s one. The other is that you have a sense of their trustworthiness. Those are the two things that help matches turn into ongoing connections. When you make your question, “Does my soul feels safe with this person? Do I have this innate sense of this person’s goodness, commitment to values that really matter to me, including in their integrity, in the way that they treat me, in the way that they treat other people?” When you make that your question, the first thing that happens that is amazing is that you somehow stand straighter. There is a self-love that you have and a self-dignity that you kind of develop. It gives you the spine that you want. It helps you organize around really, really, really what matters most. Because when you don’t do that, the message is I’m going to sell out on that stuff if there’s chemistry and if someone is interested in me. That brings us down a path that we don’t want to go, that makes us so susceptible to unhealthy relationships. A triggered sense of insecurity often comes from another person's unavailability or unsafety.CLICK TO TWEETThis question, “Does my soul feel safe?” You know, we can tell much more quickly than we think by how the person talks to the waitperson, by how they talk to us as the dating continues, how they talk about difficult things, how they treat us, how they communicate with us, how they live their life with their friends. This is something that I have seen so much in the work that I do, in my intensives, in my courses, that people begin to say, “I lose my taste for people with whom I don’t feel safe, and I get out of there, and I get out of there more quickly,” which is such a hugely important thing. In other words, this is like living self-love in dating when you say this. When you say it and you make this conscious decision that you’re only going to pursue chemistries that include that wonderful chemistry of sensing someone’s goodness, safety and solidity, which combined with a person who is sexy to you, that is just happiness. It’s real happiness. Just to say a little bit more about these kind of chemistries. Do you remember a time in your life when you have felt that kind of chemistry towards someone in a romantic relationship? That kind of “My soul feels safe” feeling, in combination, of course, with being attracted to them. Let yourself just remember that because you kind of want to orient yourself so that that’s what you’re looking for. As you remember it and develop more and more of a taste for that, truly, truly, truly your dating life is going to change. Your search for love is going to change, and hence your future is going to change. So simple but so true, because you are acting now on self-love instead of that other place which is like bending yourself into a pretzel to get the person to be interested, to think you’re irresistible, to want to be with you, to value you, to treat you right. When you have to bend yourself into a pretzel to experience that, that’s a huge, huge sign that something is really not safe, that it’s not the kind of chemistry you’re looking for.

  If there’s nobody who you can remember in your life with whom you’ve had a romantic connection, which has that feeling of, “Myself feels safe with this person,” then think about a friend that you feel that with, and what that’s like because that is what you’re looking for. That’s bedrock. It is the only place you want to build your home. Now, let’s talk about some of the other kinds of chemistries and I’m just kind of talking about two chemistries. It’s a little bit binary because there are so many different kinds of chemistries. I think a huge and important question to ask yourself is, “Where have you felt that chemistry of attraction combined with goodness, integrity, generosity and safety that you feel from that person?”

The Sexy But Unsafe Chemistry

If you haven’t had that yet, welcome to your future because you can choose that. It’s a little scary because you have to say no to so many people, but it’s a future that you can absolutely choose. When you make that, your question and your focus on your intention, your dating life changes on its axis. Okay, let’s talk about another kind of chemistry and that’s a chemistry that’s sexy, exciting, erotic, delicious and hot, but it’s not safe. It’s not truly safe and you feel it inside. You’re always tweaking, manipulating and trying to convince yourself that you’re just being too sensitive or you should just be more detached, and you shouldn’t worry about that and let that go. You’re always doing that to convince yourself that that weird unsafe feeling where your feet are touching the ground in this relationship, this sense of shakiness or not rightness, you’re doing all these things to convince yourself that it’s really okay. That convincing really translates into, “I’m not enough and I have to fix myself.” There are so many different kinds of beautiful chemistries in this world, but we need to develop a taste for them.CLICK TO TWEETRemember some kind of maybe bad boy, bad girl, bad person, kind of sexy-sexy, cocky, not so friendly, not so nice, or wonderful and glorious and then disappears, or wonderful and glorious and then just doesn’t treat you well, or is wonderful and glorious in there but they’re not so honest. Those kinds of relationships where your feet don’t feel safe on the ground, but this person is sexy and you’re desirous. Also, they’re available and they’re there. Maybe they love you and that is breathtakingly hard to say no to. Just remember those kinds of experiences, because those kinds of experiences where you can’t say in an essential way, “My soul feels safe with this person in terms of their integrity, their decency, their availability, their solidity.” The thing is that those relationships often feel so sexy. That’s this unconscious thing of looking for someone who is just doesn’t love you fully, which increases their sense of value. They must be pretty special because you’re obviously not special as them, and decreases your sense of value. This is a rich another kind of the point. If you find in a relationship again and again that you were feeling insecure like a deep insecurity, very often it’s because the other person is not safe, does not fully value you for who you are, but you don’t translate it. Often we don’t translate that into, “This person is not treating me the way I want to be treated. There’s something off here. There’s something not right. There’s something that doesn’t align with my values.” Instead, we think, “Why am I feeling so insecure? I have to get over this insecurity.” Often, that triggered sense of insecurity comes from another person’s unavailability or unsafety. If you’re feeling consistently insecure or frequently or chronically insecure in a relationship, don’t be so quick to assume that you’re just insecure, because there’s a really, really good chance that something in the person’s way of being with you is not making your soul feel safe inside. Often, these relationships are very roller-coastery. The person might have some attributes that are highly sexy to you like the way that they look or they might be very wealthy, or they might have a great deal of success. They may have personality qualities that you just adore, creativity, generosity, there may be kind of sexy qualities of being dominant and aggressive or sexy qualities of being pliable and submissive, fierce leader, or someone who backs you and supports you. These things that can be really sexy and glorious, but is there that shakiness in the ground, that shakiness, that unsafety, that unstability in the ground beneath your feet? We have to learn to honor that as well.

  Try to remember if you have experienced that kind of experience, like a relationship with someone where that beautiful sense of transparency that comes when you know someone’s going to be truthful and kind wasn’t really there. That feeling of safety and being loved, treasured and accepted wasn’t really there. What happens for you in that circuitry when you’re attracted, when there’s chemistry with someone like that? Just take a minute to remember what that’s like. Those feel so much like love and they also trigger those deep-down places where we feel like, “I’m really not kind of enough so I get it. I get it why they’re not quite that into me.” Those triggers are there for all of us. All of us can be triggered or almost all of us can be triggered in those ways, which is why it’s so important to be able to know these different chemistries to look at your life history and patterns and see what those are, where they have led you?

A World Full Of Possible Chemistries

There is not just one chemistry and there are not two chemistries. There is a world full of possible chemistries, and some of them are highly erotic and romantic, some start out gently erotic and romantic but grow, some start out erotic and then turn into friendships, some touch different parts of our being. There are so many different kinds of chemistries. Just like we’re discovering that there are so many different kinds of gender identities. This makes me think of a beautiful book by Michael Cunningham called A Home at the End of the World. I tell this story sometimes. This boy is in front of the mirror and he’s making up his face, and half of his face has shaving cream. He’s got this guy thing going on. This man thing that he’s imagining or emulating, and then he puts on makeup on the other side of his face, and he just looks at himself. He says, “I didn’t know that there were so many different kinds of beauties that could exist in this world.” What I want to say is that there are so many different kinds of beautiful chemistries in this world, but we need to develop a taste for them. This is something else that I think is really important to know. It’s something I talk about a lot. When you’re with someone who is safe, available, decent and just present, you might find this strange experience of your desire plummeting and then thinking, “Oh my God, I guess I just wasn’t attractive enough.” You think, “I am so superficial. The people who are really good for me, I just run from them,” but whatever it is, you kind of like leave because you don’t want to hurt them anymore and you realize you’re not interested. What this is, is something that I call “the wave” which so many of us have, which is this wave of disinterest, judgment, boredom or desire to get away, or suffocation that happens when we find someone who’s just plain available. When we are used to deriving our spice and our chemistry from people who are not that available, there is a shift that needs to happen. What I would say is that wave is actually a spasm of fear. Like a wave, it hits us and then it goes away. If you are changing your kind of path of chemistries for people who are available and decent, and make your soul feel safe, understand that that white-hot roller-coastery sexiness will go away and will need to be replaced with a new kind of sexiness, which is the deep revealing of who you are and being met, held and caught by the other person. When you can reveal that romantically, sexually, spiritually, and the other person is there for you, it’s just the most incredible experience. For those of us who are used to pursuing these chemistries of the rollercoaster, this will take a little bit of getting used to. It’ll take a little bit of our friends reminding us of how wonderful this person is or telling us, “You fuck this up and I’ll kill you.”

  The other thing that happens that is really cool is this approach of understanding that we are going to just choose what I call “Attractions of inspiration” versus “Attractions of deprivation”. This approach begins to heal our attachment wounds. When your deep-down insides know that you, as the gatekeeper in your dating life, is going to only choose relationships that have this goodness, and this safety, and this rightness, that deep inner part of you is going to begin to relax and feel more secure. When you choose someone like that, that relationship will deepen your capacity for secure attachment, and it becomes a very virtuous cycle. When your deep insides don’t feel safe because they know that you’re going to be pursuing these other kinds of relationships, there’s a sense of insecurity and unsafety, which exacerbates ways in which we might have an anxious or avoidant attachment style. That’s kind of like another benefit that happens is we learn self-love by making these choices. I’m very excited to hear your experiences with these things, and I’d love you to go to DeeperDatingPodcast.com, and you can go to Ask Ken and leave me messages there. You can leave recorded messages. You can let me know if you want me to use your recording, or if you’d just like me to kind of paraphrase. If I don’t hear that from you, I will just paraphrase. I want to hear your stories of playing with this, experimenting with this, and the shifts that happen for you because they’re going to be good ones. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of The Deeper Dating Podcast, and I look forward to connecting next episode.

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Conscious love, conscious business, conscious spirituality! In this episode, I had the privilege of interviewing Tami Simon, the brilliant, soulful and very authentic CEO of Sounds True; the world’s largest living library of transformational teachings to support and accelerate spiritual awakening and personal transformation. For me, this stunning interview was a spiritual experience. Not to be missed! —

Table of Contents

• Realizing The Desire Of Sharing Spiritual Teachings
• Opening The Door To Financial Abundance
• Stepping Into The Magic Of Life
• Inner MBA Program

Love, Spirit And The Entrepreneur’s Journey: An Interview With Tami Simon

Conscious love, conscious business, conscious spirituality. Today, I’m so excited to be interviewing Tami Simon. The brilliant, soulful and very authentic CEO of Sounds True, which is the world’s largest living library of transformational teachings to support and accelerate spiritual awakening and personal transformation. Stay tuned to this episode of the Deeper Dating Podcast. — Hello, everybody and welcome to the Deeper Dating Podcast. I’m Ken Page. I’m a psychotherapist. I’m the author of Deeper Dating and the Co-Founder of DeeperDating.com. In this podcast, I’m going to share with you the greatest tools and the greatest voices of wisdom that I know to help you find love, keep it flourishing and heal your life in the process, because the skills of dating are nothing more than the skills of love, and those are the greatest skills of all for a happy life. If you want to learn more or join my mailing list, just go to DeeperDatingPodcast.com. Today, I am so excited to be interviewing Tami Simon about the intersection of love, entrepreneurship, spirituality and business. Tami is the Founder of Sounds True, which is a multimedia publisher based in Boulder, Colorado. Tami started Sounds True in 1985 at the age of 22 with a clear purpose, to disseminate spiritual wisdom. Over its 36-year history, Sounds True has produced over 3,000 learning programs with the world’s leading wisdom teachers. It’s been twice named to the Inc. 500 list of the fastest growing private companies in North America. Tami also hosts the Sounds True Podcast: Insights at the Edge, which has been downloaded more than twenty million times. She’s also the Founder of Sounds True’s Inner MBA Program, which is now in its second year. It’s a nine-month immersion program that trains entrepreneurs, managers and employees on the inner wisdom skills needed for outer business success. Tami lives in Boulder, Colorado with her partner of twenty-plus years, Julie Kramer, and their two spoodles, Raspberry and Beulah. Tami is a true teacher of spirituality, wisdom, entrepreneurship, decency and integrity. I love her and I love her work. I’m so excited to be interviewing her. —- Tami, it is so good to be with you. Welcome and thank you for taking the time to be here on this podcast. It’s wonderful to be with you, Ken. Thank you so much. You’re someone I have looked up to for a really long time and I have seen you as a visionary in what you do in the world. God knows, I have listened to the recordings of Sounds True and sent them to people I love. Numerous people who have been through surgery have been through the visualization tapes that I’ve gotten again and again from you, for people that I love. The work that you do is very inspiring on so many levels, and I’m excited to talk with you about entrepreneurship, love and intimacy. You’re bringing up my favorite topics all in one sentence. Oh, good, good, good. Yeah, because you live those things and so many people I know are entrepreneurs or really trying to create their own vision of what they want to contribute to the world and care deeply about love. I would just love to start hearing about your journey, your love journey, your intimacy journey, your entrepreneurship journey, your Sounds True journey, and how all of those have woven together. I know that’s big but I’d love to hear about it. Love, intimacy, and entrepreneurship come from a lot of pain, anguish, and alienation.CLICK TO TWEETThat’s okay. Well, you know, the truth is it comes from a lot of pain, anguish and alienation. That’s the starting point for all of these beautiful things, love, intimacy and really entrepreneurship. That word makes it sound maybe bigger than what it feels like inside. What it feels like inside of me is being creative, giving to other people, making enough money to support myself, sharing my gifts with the world, really. That’s what it means to me. I think, the reason I say it comes from a lot of anguish and alienation is I grew up feeling kind of like I’d landed here from another planet and I wasn’t quite sure I belonged. I didn’t feel necessarily like I belonged in my family, and I certainly didn’t feel like I belonged as part of the human race, a race that I saw heading swiftly to destruction, and treating the way humans treated each other, which I thought was at such a gross level of existence. I was a very sensitive and idealistic young person. I wasn’t quite sure, actually, I would have a place here, a place on Earth, and it started with being drawn to philosophy. I wanted to make sense of things and then that turned into religious studies because at least that’s direct. It’s about personal revelatory experience. I was searching, searching, searching. What I didn’t know is that I was actually searching for, are you ready for this, connection. Connection with other people, connection with my own body, and in connecting with my own body, connecting with a lot of very intense emotions that as a young person, I didn’t even know how to turn towards and be with. In some ways, my whole spiritual search was just a way to be at home in my body through meditation with intense emotions. I would say, I became an “entrepreneur,” to use your word, primarily because I was completely unemployable. There’s a lot here, Ken, but you know, I dropped out of college. I went to India to study meditation for a year. I traveled through Sri Lanka and Nepal. I committed myself to bringing these internal practices, which helped me feel connected inside myself for the first time in my life. I committed to bringing those to as many people as possible. I wasn’t particularly interested in starting a business. It took me years before I even realized I was in business. I wanted to help bring inner connective practices to other people because I felt like they had saved my own life. Then in my journey as a lover, I came out as a lesbian in my early twenties and had painful relationships really until I was 39 years old. I met the woman that I’ve been with for the last twenty years, a woman named Julie Kramer. I think there was so much deep healing I first had to go through on my own to even be ready for that kind of partnership. Then that partnership has been the greatest source of healing in my life, and has given me so much energy and inspiration for my work. I think of it as a reservoir, and my work comes from that reservoir of energy and goodness and overflow that can go towards others. Thank you for your deep honesty and truth-telling. There are about a million points that I relate to you on, and I have a number of questions but I just want to start with one from what you shared. Could you tell me, can you tell us about the moment that you realized that that was going to be what you wanted to do? How that happened that you realized that that was what you wanted to do, was to share these teachings?

Realizing The Desire Of Sharing Spiritual Teachings

Sure. Well, I left college really on a search, and when I went to Sri Lanka originally, I was introduced to meditation in a ten-day bootcamp style with someone named S. N. Goenka who’s a Burmese meditation master. He was teaching in-person. For people who know of his work, it’s kind of a big deal because he’s such a legendary figure. There he was. Ten days you wake up at 5:00 in the morning and you go to sleep at 10:00 PM, and you meditate all day for ten days in what’s known as noble silence. You’re not speaking at all during this ten-day period. At the end of my first ten-day retreat, it’s kind of like the lights went on inside me, in a way, for the first time. Afterwards, I went and I spoke to a professor. I was staying at his home. He had been at Swarthmore College one year on a Fulbright scholarship. When he left with his family, I left with him to go to Sri Lanka, but he looked at me when I come out of the ten-day retreat and he said, “Your eyes look so different, Tami. There’s suddenly this kind of light in them that I always knew was there, but now I can see it and feel it and sense it,” and I could feel that inside myself. I don’t really know how else to describe it but it was a quality of homecoming and the lights going on. Then I decided I want to do another one of these ten-day retreats so I’m going to travel up to Goenka Center in India. As I was traveling, I stopped at various Buddhist temples on the way, and this is to answer your question. What I found myself doing was lying in the dirt at these temples outside, and they would have these full moon ceremonies so people would stay up all night and chant at various temples. I would lie down in the dirt with my arms outstretched in a full prostration and said, “I give my life to these teachings. I give my whole life to it. This is it. Everything I have. All the cells in my body, may you be used in service of bringing as many people as possible to this type of inner discovery.” It started with those kinds of prayers but of course, that’s not a business. That’s a 21-year-old kid lying in the dirt in India, praying. You know what I mean. I just have to back up here for a minute and say that that is incredibly beautiful and incredibly personal, and thank you for sharing it. It’s very moving.

  That’s when you learn a little bit about my heart and the kind of gonzo nature of my heart that that’s what was in me, but I had no idea what that might look like. When I came back from my travels in India, my parents were like, “Now it’s time to get a college degree, right? Game over. Adventure is over.” I wasn’t able to get a college degree. It didn’t make sense to me to pursue an academic path. They said, “We’re not going to support you anymore.” I said, “Make sense. Why should you support me? I’ll go get a job.” I started volunteering at the same time that I was working at a Chinese restaurant. I started volunteering for the local community radio station because I wanted to interview spiritual teachers to try to understand what happened to me. I wanted to get a sense of where am I on this journey. “What’s going on? I feel so different. I feel like I’ve been rewired. I don’t even know myself. I’ve entered a different sense of time, a different sense of priorities. I don’t know who I am. Help me.” I wanted to talk to spiritual teachers and I wanted to keep getting an education, just not an academic education. One of the people that I was interviewing, and this is really interesting because it ended up that he is a very successful businessman. At the time, with this community radio station volunteer show, I was interviewing him of all things about crystals, because he had these huge crystals. We’re talking like 1.5 foot tall and 10 inches wide in his window, and I would walk by them all the time on my way to the radio station. He also had a yin yang symbol, you ready for this, with a dollar sign in the center. I was like, “What’s going on?” He said, “It’s a transformational economy.” I’m like, “What’s the yin yang sign with the dollar symbol in these crystals? What’s going on with this person? I want to talk to him. I’ll interview him for my radio show.” He and I are getting to know each other, and in the course of getting to know each other, preparing for the interview, my father passes away. My father died when I was 21 and when he died, I received a small inheritance, which was about $50,000. I said to this gentleman, “I’ve now received this inheritance and I don’t know what to do with it. I don’t know what to do with this money. You seem to know a lot about transformational economy. What should I do? I’m looking for some advice? What should I do with this money?” He said, “Why don’t you put it into yourself?” I was like, “Really good idea, but what are me and my bad self going to do with that? We don’t know.” All the multiplicities of me, “What are we going to do with this money? I don’t know.” He just looked at me and he said, “Tami, come back in three days and we’ll talk about it. I have a feeling you know what you want to do.” I was like, “Okay, I’ll come back in three days and talk to you again.” I walked out of his office and Ken, you know things like this happen. It happened to me. You know, you hear stories like this so this is my story. I walk out of his office and suddenly, I started feeling quite odd like I was walking a few feet above the ground. That was, first of all, something that I’d never experienced. I was like, “This is really weird. I feel like I’m walking on air.” It’s a really weird feeling. Then I heard a voice and of course, I don’t know where it came from. It was an inner voice or what, and I heard the words, “disseminate spiritual wisdom.” Those three words. Then my feet hit the ground. I started walking and I started thinking about it and how I might be able to do that. It was from that experience that Sounds True was born. Wow. I don’t really have a lot of words for that. That’s incredibly beautiful and powerful in its own entity, its own entity of truth. Thank you so much for telling that story. You know, there are so many things in life the older I get. I’m almost 60 now so I’m sharing with you something that happened 38 years ago, but there are so many things that are mysterious, and the older that I get, the more dimensions of intelligence that I see operating in my own life. Like I think so often that what’s happening is what Tami Simon, the embodied ego person, is thinking about. I think it’s so much more complicated than that. There are so many more factors, and quite honestly, there’s so much more support for us when we’re in a place of deep sincerity and service and open-heartedness. There’s so much support that wants to collaborate and work with us. That’s really been my experience, and the older I get, the clearer it is to me. How beautiful. I would like to ask you about that and again, I’m kind of putting aside about a million shared stories and other questions, but I want to follow this thread that feels so significant to me. For everybody who is listening to this episode who is thinking, “I would like to enlist that shared support in my search for a loving relationship,” or “I would like to enlist that support in my search to be able to have financial abundance or both.” Can you talk to us about what opens that door?

Opening The Door To Financial Abundance

Yeah. Well, this is what I’ve come to see at this moment in time and it’s about our life being for others. We think we want these things for ourselves, and I think when we have that kind of viewpoint, if that’s what’s leading the charge, I don’t think that evokes the same kind of magic if you will, as when we devote ourselves to other humans, just to others, to life. When we say, “I am here as a servant. I’m here. I want to bring love into my life so I can really love someone, so I can give all that I have to give,” which is a little different than, “So that this person will admire me and  do all these things for me.” A healthy partnership can be your greatest source of healing, energy, and inspiration for your work.CLICK TO TWEETIt’s like, “I want a creative business life where I’m bringing my best talents to lift up our suffering world in every way I can. I want to bring so much value to other people. I want to deliver value, value, value to others in the ways that are most meaningful, that lights me up and where I see other people come alive from my generosity.” I think when we lead with that kind of spirit, and not just in words, it’s actions. It’s actions we take every day to go out of our way for other people, really. I think when we do that, we become so magnetic. You know, you can’t keep people or projects away from us. Two questions here. One question is what about the people who are listening and saying, “I give, I give, I give, I give, I give, I give but I’m still not in a relationship. I’m in a relationship with people who I give to” or “I give, I give, I give but I’m not making much money.” They say, “Yeah, I love that service concept but there’s a depletion that comes because I’m not taking. I’m not receiving.” Well, you have to give to yourself too. You’re a part of the equation, and so it’s not just out there. There has to be a sense of energetic balance in the whole thing. Which is where your journey started with someone saying you should give to you. That was kind of the first step there. Yeah. Treat yourself like the number one person you’re responsible for, but that’s still a different lens that I think a lot of times, especially when people approach business, they are really looking at the financial gain picture that is leading the picture. I just don’t think that works if you’re trying to create a business with soul. If you’re trying to create a business that you know is filled with goodness and meaning, I don’t think that can come first. I think the value you’re bringing to other people comes first. I’m trying to not make it quite the same in the relationship world because I don’t think necessarily the business and the relationship thing are you know. I haven’t thought about that this much, Ken, so I don’t want to just group them together. That feels very clear to me in the business world. In the relationship world, what I see is just an infinity symbol, and this notion of utter reciprocity and generosity between you and another person where the outpouring of that is something that benefits your community. I can feel that. That makes sense to me.

  In a sense, I see the connection between those being, that it’s about being in a state where you’re caring about love. Like when you’re in that place that you are caring about love, that is what you’re thinking about, and that’s what matters to you, that space makes all the difference I guess in both arenas, really. I know for me, my story is so similar to your story in so many ways. From growing up queer to a lot of pain, leading to a spiritual search and a spiritual path that I started in high school with a guru whose name is Yogananda, who has been my guru since I was like seventeen years old. Not really fitting into the college world or the academic world and kind of the importance of spirituality, and then really struggling with finding a relationship, and then finding it really late. So many deep connections, but I know that for me, which I think relates to what you’re saying. When I was in the place of looking, looking, looking, there was an emptiness inside. There was a stillness. Not a good stillness, an empty stillness inside of me, and when my longing for the reciprocity of love became the most important thing, well, there was a lot of pain with that, but that reciprocity of love, that was the thing that mattered the most, and that’s what changed things. I think that’s the key. Another big thing occurs to me, Ken, which is we’ve kind of placed the listener into this special like, “I’m going to magnetize. I’m going to manifest. I’m going to manifest the love in my life and I’m going to manifest the business thing in my life.” To be honest, I think that’s not how I see stuff, and I actually think it’s a little bit of an egoic overlay that we’re putting on the magic of life. Oh, how beautiful. If it’s more like the magic of life will deliver life through me, it will bring all the partners that I need. It will bring the email connections. It will bring the investors. It will bring the friends because life itself is teeming with intelligence and wanting to be in this gorgeous dialogue. My job is to be a patient participant, and to give what I have, but it’s not like it’s my show. You know what I mean. It’s more like I’m in a show and I’m listening and I’m looking and I’m seeing what has to happen. You know, there’s a teaching from Thich Nhat Hanh that has to do with things happen when conditions are sufficient. Conditions are sometimes sufficient not on our timetable. For example, with Sounds True, I have been on this journey for 37 years now. It’s not like it was so profitable for the first X number of years, but it was the thing that was right for me to do and I knew that. I wasn’t going to waiver from it like, “Oh, it hasn’t made this amount of return in this amount of time. I guess, I’ll hop to a different career.” I was like, “No, that’s not how the great mystics thought when they were creating a hermitage. They did it in a devotional style and how long might it take for this partner, for conditions to become sufficient for this person to come? We don’t know.” I look at it more like being a participant in a magical, creative, brilliant, sparkling world, and things happen when they happen. You know, usually, I have a lot to say but I find myself being completely silent when you say things like that. Very beautiful, very powerful, and that was a gift. In my podcast, I usually try to take some moments that feel important and turn them into practices. I would love to do that with our listeners with what you just said. We get taught so often this kind of force thing about manifesting. They really does have this I quality and this struggle quality and a pain around it. What you just said is, this is how I’m experiencing what you said, what about if we do this differently? What about if we enter into the search for love, life, abundance, entrepreneurship and creation by saying, “I want to step into the magic of life?”

Stepping Into The Magic Of Life

That’s going to be the medium, stepping into the magic of life. I think of those kids who are really good with jump rope, that could just step into this amazing kind of jump rope thing. They know when to step in, but I would invite everybody now to take a moment and imagine what would that mean for you, and I’m going to do the same, to step into the magic of life and have that be the way we approach our search for a career, our search for love. What if we did it by stepping into the magic of life? I encourage people to pause the recording if you like. I’m going to take a moment, but I just think that that was pure magic and I adore it. Well, also even this notion of stepping into it right here together, we could just fall into this very moment, which is this very moment right here. You and I, Ken, new friends. New friends who value each other and who see a kind of preciousness and this timing of the intersection of our lives together, whatever comes from it. We feel that, “Oh, my gosh,” wherever the listener is right now, right here, tuning into the quality of something like light in the room. What is light? What is it? Feeling or breathing, the miracle, the unbelievable savoring miracle of a full inhale, just take it in. Feel it, whatever part of your body, it touches your belly, your chest, your nose. I mean, this is exquisite. You don’t need a partner or a business or anything out of this moment of the inhale, the top of the inhale, the fullness. How full we are each with life at the top of the inhale, bursting? Then the exhale itself, which is a huge release and letting go, and then the interesting space at the end of the exhale, which has a kind of openness to it, no boundaries to it. That’s just one conscious breath, savored, enjoyed, supremely delighted in. I think when we have this kind of spirit and we keep living with that sense of utter appreciation, and it can even be something hard you discover inside in your experience when you’re breathing. Even if you hit some heartache or something, even that has a richness and intensity, and it’s sort of deeply fascinating, even if it’s difficult, and sometimes it can be difficult, but I think when we have that kind of attitude and we’re in present time, that’s where there’s so much power to actually celebrate all that we already have right here. May all the cells in our body serve others and bring them to inner discovery.CLICK TO TWEETWell, that was a beautiful spiritual ice cream sundae for everybody. Yeah and I think sometimes, we have our ice cream sundaes and then we put them aside, and we’re like, “Now the search is back on and the me-show is back. Like, that’s great. That’s my spiritual sundae,” which is okay. I mean, that’s over here when I do my practices or whatever but then it’s up to me to manifest this thing. What I’m actually offering is this idea that we can live more like that, and when we do, we find really a lot of opportunities are naturally coming to us. First of all, you become very magnetic. This is what I was saying to other people. If you’re like, “Well, people don’t seem very attracted to me or interested in me or dah, dah, dah.” Well, someone who’s in the present, who’s appreciating the sky, suddenly people are like, “I’d like to be sitting next to that person. I’d like to be in their presence, in the field of their being, because being around them is so calming. It’s so loving. It’s so warm. I love being near them.” I mean, we love being near people like that. I love being near people like that. Absolutely. It’s almost like being next to a fire when it’s slightly cold out or something. You’re warmed by such a person. In terms of relationships, it’s a way that people just want to be around you. “I want to be around you.” Then I think in terms of creative business life, I know I love having people on our team who are very open. Their minds are open and they are really present because what I know happens is that the best ideas come from working with people like that. They listen, listen, listen and suddenly, they say this thing and I’m like, “That’s cool.” I know there’s kind of enough space for the good new stuff to come and be part of the conversation. We’re not just recycling what other companies have done and other people have done, because we’re looking outside in a desperate search to copy the moneymaker out there. No, we’re listening. What’s ours to do? What’s the part we can contribute? There’s an openness to receive that.

  You’re listening for that magic and then when you hear it, you go with it. Yeah. You can feel it. You know, what this is leading me to think about too is humility because you have that spiritual ice cream sundae. You have the beautiful connection to magic and I know for myself, what’s so often follows this is this humbling experience of seeing my clay feet when it comes to love, when it comes to business, when it comes to whatever. I just want to say something about the magic of that too, right? Like you were talking about this beauty not just coming out of happiness and fun, but out of suffering as well. I think that manifestation approach doesn’t let us be humble and stop and say, “I feel broken here. I don’t feel ready here. I feel scared here.” That’s part of the magic too, and the way that you speak invites that as well. I just want to make room for that treasure of not knowing, that treasure of feeling lost, of being humbled by seeing where we are not ready for the next step yet, and holding that with cupped hands. I hear what you’re saying. What occurs to me for a moment is something I learned from somebody I work with. This is somebody I’ve worked with now for the past six years. Her name is Sibyl. She has really powerful faith and trust, and she’s pretty gosh darn fearless when it comes to all the different projects that we’re doing at Sounds True. Many of which are very high risk and certainly might not work. I’ve been trying to understand, “How do you get this way? I want to get more of what you got. I want to have that kind of attitude.” She told me something. She’s like, “Look, Tami. I live by the 70/30 rule. The 70/30 rule is that I’m only responsible for 30% of what’s happening, and 70% of what’s happening is up to the universe. First of all, I’m only 30% here, and here’s the thing, I’m going to give 100% to my 30%. I’m going to give 100% to that, but I know I’m only responsible for 30% of what might happen.” What happened for me after hearing this from her is I started looking at projects that way, and I just started thinking, “Okay, I’m going to give 100% to my part, to my 30%. I’m talking ‘business speak’ here, just kidding with you Ken.” It’s like, “Of course, I’m going to respond and dot my I’s and follow through.” When I get an idea then I say to somebody, “I’m going to send you this,” I do 100% but that’s only 30% of the equation, and the rest is this huge letting go. It’s this huge letting go. When the universe is ready, when conditions are sufficient, these things will happen. I’m not taking it on as it’s up to me. I just did my part. What I’ve watched is it works incredibly well. It takes a lot of the pressure off. I get it. I instantly feel a relief of pressure, but tell me how it works well. It works well because it opens the space for unforeseen things to happen because you’re like, “Okay, 70% of this. I’m going to follow these little breadcrumbs when I see them, because that’s how the universe is playing with me.” Now remember, the universe is alive. We’re not like in some dead world where we humans are. The whole thing, everything, all the air molecules, all the Earth molecules, all of the dimensions we can’t see. It’s all living, breathing, interacting, interacting with our thoughts and feelings, everything. This very alive universe is also, “Oh, okay.” It attunes us to that. I also think it gets us out of this good me, bad me. I’m here talking about humility. There’s the, “Look what I did. I magnetized my partner and I built this great successful company and sold it for XYZ.” The universe gets the credit for these things. Seventy-percent. Yeah. I did my part and I played faithfully, and I did what I could. It’s naturally humbling in that sense, but it also gets us out of this self-flagellation that I think is so terrible like in terms of the timing of meeting a partner. Well, what if it’s like some problem you have? No. What if 70% is this universal timing thing? So relax about it in that sense. Your 30% is to step into whatever it is that you’re learning, whatever is the magic that is possible, whatever the dance is that’s in front of you. I love that. I think that’s so big too because I think that people define their success with love based on, are they in a good relationship now? I don’t think it works that way. I mean, yes, that’s a big deal to be in a loving good relationship. It really is but so many of the skills of love are love itself, and if you’re learning those skills, you can’t determine the success of your journey by, do you have a partner right now? Well, I’m going to say something weird, Ken. I haven’t said this to anybody but that’s okay. You know, I’ve been feeling very fortunate in my life about a couple of different things, and Julie, my wife, and I were talking about how we’re now, I’m using this as a metaphor so I’ll try to be quick here, but how we’re now working with a contractor that we really want to work with to do some remodeling in our house and how fortunate we are that he’s available next summer, because in Boulder right now, it’s very hard to get contractors. They’re booked out years in advance and everything. I thought to myself, “You know, like with so many things, we had to fire the old contractor that wasn’t working.” The best ideas come from working with people whose minds are open and present.CLICK TO TWEETIt’s not so much like, “Okay, this person I just described to you that I work with.” I bless my lucky stars that I get to work with this woman named Sibyl. I feel so fortunate like how could the universe have brought me my business soulmate, if you will, like this? Oh, my God, and yet I had to break up with a couple of other people, previously, before Sibyl came on the scene, and breaking up with those other people was really hard. Business breakups are hard. I knew it wasn’t right, though I had to muster all my courage. I thought if anything, this is getting to my point here, the gratitude I have. I’m like, “God, I feel so lucky that I did the hard work of getting out of the situations that weren’t working.” Then the universe, over time as I grew, delivered something to me, but getting out of those previous situations was tough.

Inner MBA Program

Oh, saying no is so hard and so liberating and so important, so thank you for making space for that too. Tami, you’ve shared all these practices and these concepts that are just delicious and powerful and revelatory. Can you talk a little bit about this Inner MBA Program that you have created for people who might want to learn more of these tools and really apply them? Sure. Well, I think one of the things that are really important to me is that our work relationships, just like our intimate relationships, become part of our growth path as individuals. People often say that intimate relationships are the crucible for spiritual growth and development. True. Well, now we have these relationships with all these people we work with. They’re not our intimate love relationships. They’re our relationships at work. I have learned and grown so much from the people that I’ve worked with. I would go so far as to say that the workplace can be, and needs to be, a crucible for personal growth. The reason I say that is even for people who are maybe not signing on to say, “I want to do a lot of deep therapy work, et cetera.” They’re working with other people.

If you start creating that as the norm, for example, at Sounds True, we have a commitment. We are committed to grow and transform. It’s one of our core values. It’s part of what we’re doing. That means that we say things to other people like, “When you interact X, Y, Z way with me, it shuts me down in the meeting instead of creating an opening for me to bring forward my ideas,” or “Do you realize that that’s your own kind of fear of being left out that’s putting you into all these meetings that you don’t really need to be in? That may not be the best use of your time,” and so committing to the workplace being a place of personal growth is a really important idea to me and that’s because like you, I want people to grow. I want to grow myself and I want other people to grow because I have a vision of a different kind of society where people have a different level of self-awareness and personal accountability and responsibility. I think the workplace can be that incubator. Knowing this and experimenting with this for many years at Sounds True, I started seeing what some of the core ideas were that really support that kind of growth and development. First of all, you have to have a level of self-awareness. You have to know that managing yourself is actually the most important job for anybody, whether you’re a manager of other people or not. That means managing your reactivity, starting to know your own mind and heart, the skills of emotional intelligence at work, how to have difficult conversations, how to speak from a place of vulnerability and listen deeply to other people, how to recognize the cognitive diversity that’s in the room, as well as all the other forms of diversity, visible and invisible, and what that means to let each person at work show up as a unique soul at work. What is their unique perspective and how that’s what actually creates exceptional teamwork when the best is brought out at everybody, how to create that kind of psychological safety at work. I could keep going here, but you’re getting the notion. These are all of the skills that we decided to bake into the Inner MBA because unlike a traditional MBA that teaches you accounting, finance strategy, fundraising, etc., this teaches you how to grow as a person, knowing that the more you grow as an individual, you’ll be able to bring that to your workplace and grow with other people and grow your business too. It’s so wonderful because then the skills of intimacy are the skills of a workplace and the skills of business, because all the skills you’re describing are the skills of intimacy. I think the skills of intimacy become the skills in business, and we get a lot of reflections in our business world that help us also in our intimate relationships. I think too often in the past, the idea of a successful entrepreneur, first of all, only 4% of all businesses in the United States right now are run by women, have female CEOs. Most of the CEOs historically have been men, and after spending a bunch of time talking to many CEOs, I also discovered that a lot of them did not have what I would call very intimate relationships. Meaning they’re traveling 50 weeks who has time to be a husband or a father. That’s an old model, and I think it’s a model that actually doesn’t serve us as individuals, and I don’t think it serves our culture either because then you have children growing up without fathers because they’re gone out being the warrior making money. For example, one of the things at Sounds True that’s been so important to us is to support mothers and fathers and having the time to be family people, to be with their families, to have flexible jobs where they can prioritize that. We want you to be family people. Don’t make those kinds of sacrifices for the corporation. We’re going to be fine. The more you are whole with your family, the more your creative heart will come to the company and that’s going to benefit our business. I think it’s important to have a different vision of success and I think that’s part of what the Inner MBA is about. It’s about creating businesses that say, “Yes, of course, we’re interested in financial flourishing but primarily, we’re interested in human flourishing.” Humans flourishing together. Yes. That’s the principle that all of this radiates out from. Yes and it’s a nine-month immersion training. We created online training in partnership with LinkedIn and then also Wisdom 2.0, which is an organization that brings together a conversation with technology leaders and wisdom leaders, and then also a division of NYU called MindfulNYU. We’ve all partnered together to create this nine-month online training, really to change the world of business so that business supports human growth, human flourishing, and becomes a force for good in the world with the goal, because once we have our hearts online, we want to bake that into everything we do at work. You know, what’s interesting is we’ve had a CEO storytelling track. We’ve had, for example, Rose Marcario, who’s the former CEO of Patagonia, a $1.5 billion company, Joey Bergstein the CEO of Seventh Generation, half billion dollar company, Eileen Fisher, half billion dollar company, Steve Macadam who’s been running a dual bottom line company, a manufacturing company called Enpro, a public company doing close to $2 billion in sales. These principles and these ideas are not just for the feel good ice cream sundae spiritual teaching company of Sounds True. I’m going to remember that one. Meaning it’s not just this small little niche. Sure, niche businesses are great too but these ideas can scale and they will be the businesses of the future. You know, this is really interesting. It just happened today, Ken. Soren Gordhamer who’s the Founder of Wisdom 2.0, sent me a video clip from Mark Cuban, who’s one of the panelists on Shark Tank. Mark Cuban is saying, “It’s great to be an entrepreneur but you know what’s even greater? To be a compassion entrepreneur, where compassion is part of what you do at your company and for the world, and even the companies that are coming on Shark Tank, the companies that are being run by people in their 20s and 30s, there’s almost always a kind of give back component, and they’re looking to bake in this kind of a compassionate activity into the business itself.” This is also an emerging wave. We say at Sounds True, conscious business rising. It’s happening. It’s the future. It’s what customers will demand of businesses. I think the research shows that if you’re going against the cultural current to go in this direction of compassion in the world of business, you need support, right? You need people who remind you and support you and have your back as you go against so much of the current in current business. Yeah. I mean, there’s a lot at stake here too. What I mean by that is I think it’s pretty obvious that we’re in an urgent situation on the planet, and that this is going to take all of us collaborating with each other to create continuity for the human species in the next twenty-plus years. The whole idea that we can be, “Well, wait a second, wait a second. Business primarily has to be about this other thing.” Well, no, that’s not what time it is on planet earth. It’s a different time. It’s a time where all boats need to rise together. All of us need to rise together into a new connected, compassionate species for our continuation, and I think people are feeling it. I feel it. Yes, you sure do and you reflect it and you radiate it. I think this opportunity to step into the magic is just something that you really, really convey, and it’s so exciting to think about that in our search for love and our search for success in our life and abundance. I experience such a deep welcome from you in that direction. I’m going to say something, Ken, a little bit because I noticed when you say step into the magic, there’s a moment where I say, “I’d like to say it differently.” Be the magic. I’m sorry. I’m not trying to split hairs or anything but I think the language is important because step into the magic, it’s almost like there’s this mat, there’s you over here and you’re not it. You’re the confused person, the seeking person, the person who wants more money and more love now, et cetera, and then you can step into this magic. What I’m saying actually is you are the magic. You’re breathing. You’re magical right now because you’re alive. You’re an alive interconnected part of this huge web of being. You’re it. You’re the magic. That’s almost like just coming to that recognition. That’s it. Relationships are the crucible for spiritual growth and development.CLICK TO TWEETThat’s the stepping into it. That’s like stepping into yourself. I guess it’s like saying yes in a way, saying yes to an invitation. Yes. You know, part of me is like, “Oh, my God. When did I become like the unicorn rainbow person?” Like I’m on the back of a unicorn and a rainbow. Be the magic, you know. No, no, no, I’m sorry. This is hard work. This is real stuff. It is real stuff and it is 100% available to each and every one of us listening right now. So beautiful. I was going to ask you if you had any closing words and those are gorgeous closing words. I think, Tami, you are an invitation to that. Well, thank you. Thanks, Ken. You know, your warmth brings out my authenticity. What I would say to people listening is we can spend a lot of time in our skeptic mind. Believe me. I have a strong, rational skeptic mind. I have my whole life and there’s a healthiness in that, but if you are a good, healthy skeptic, you want to experiment and see what the results are of experimentation, and let the experiments give you feedback. Experiment with relishing the present moment being the magic and see what happens. Just do it for a while and see what happens. See what happens in your connections with other people. See what happens in your creative life, in your generative life. Experiment with it. This is such a message, such an invitation and I think that applies everywhere. Like I said, I think you are that invitation and I feel it. I just love this and it’s playtime, everybody. We get to play with that invitation. Tami, can you tell people how they can learn more from you? How they could learn more about the Inner MBA Program? How they can learn more about Sounds True? How they can follow you, et cetera? Come visit us at SoundsTrue.com. It’s all there and the Inner MBA Program has a special URL as well in our InnerMBAProgram.com. Come check us out. Lots of free resources. We’d love to have you come be part of Sounds True. There’s a place where you can join our email list and then you’ll find out all the things that are happening all the time. Tami, thank you so much for living what matters so much to you and this was just a joy. This was one of the most wonderful interviews that I feel like I’ve ever done. Thank you so much for being here. Thanks, Ken. Thank you. Thanks, everyone. Thank you, everyone and we’ll see you on the next episode of the Deeper Dating Podcast.

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Important Links:

• Deeper Dating
• DeeperDating.com
• Tami Simon
• Sounds True Podcast: Insights at the Edge
• N. Goenka
• Yogananda
• Thich Nhat Hanh
• SoundsTrue.com
• InnerMBAProgram.com
• https://www.soundstrue.com/
• https://innermba.soundstrue.com/
• https://www.facebook.com/soundstrue/
• https://twitter.com/soundstrue/
• https://www.instagram.com/soundstrue/

About Tami Simon

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Sometimes life and love just feel too hard. Sometimes it seems like self-love has gone into hiding. In this episode, I’ll teach you a few powerful tools for reclaiming that beautiful experience of self-love, even in the most challenging situations.

Table of Contents

• Tools For Developing Rock Spaces
• Feeling Reduced And Minimized
• Fear Of Other Peoples’ Opinions
• The Need To Toughen Up

How To Reclaim Self-Love When It Goes Away

How To Find Your Sense Of Self

All of us have times when we feel like we just can’t navigate the complexities of love, where we feel like we’re losing ourselves. In this episode, I’m going to teach you some powerful tools to reclaim yourself at those times when love and relationships just seem too complicated. Stay tuned to this episode of the Deeper Dating Podcast. — Hello and welcome to the Deeper Dating Podcast. I’m Ken Page, and I’m a Psychotherapist. I’m the author of the book Deeper Dating and the Cofounder of DeeperDating.com, which is a site where single people can meet in an environment that is fun, inspiring, kind and respectful. Today, I’m going to teach some tools for handling those times we feel we just can’t navigate love and relationships. This week and every episode, I’m going to share the greatest tools that I know to help you find love and keep it flourishing, and heal your life in the process because the skills of dating are nothing more than the skills of love, which are the greatest skills of all for a happy life. If you want to learn more about the deeper dating path to real intimacy, just go to DeeperDatingPodcast.com. You can sign up for my mailing list, get free gifts, and see transcripts of every episode. I also just want to say that everything I’m going to share in this podcast is educational in nature. It’s not medical or psychiatric advice, and if you’re experiencing any serious psychological symptoms, please seek professional help. Of course, if you like what you’re learning here, I’d love it if you could subscribe and leave me a review. Thank you so much for that. You can stand on a rock in this moving current of river called life and still have yourself.CLICK TO TWEETToday, I want to speak about the experience of not having a self or more specifically, having a hole where our sense of healthy self is supposed to be. It’s not a good feeling. It’s something we think we shouldn’t have, but it’s so much of what we do end up having in the course of this strange life that we live and in the course of learning the skills of love. There are pockets where we just don’t know, and even worse than just not knowing, there’s a “missingness” inside. Today I’m going to offer some tools for healing those places of “missingness” inside, of emptiness, of feeling like, “I just can’t do this. I’m missing a piece of me. There’s something defective in me. There’s something broken in me. I don’t have the skills.” I think in the face of this strange and treacherous life, and in the face of the strange and treacherous, often, experience of intimacy, and the mystery of what happens in love, we’re so often confronted with that experience. I think as we grow, we learn the skills to lose ourselves less. Even when we don’t know who we are, even when we’re bewildered and in pain and stuck, we learn these skills. I think of it as trying to cross a wide river and that experience like, “There’s no way I can do this. I can’t do it. There’s no place for me to stand. I can’t get through.” In my life, there have been so many of those times and there still are many of those times, but especially when I was younger, that terrible place of, “I just don’t know. I don’t have the tools. I don’t have the ground to stand on.” After so many experiences of confronting that very painful place, and finding the tools of discovering myself, the image is like this river that I need to cross and all of a sudden, there’s a rock underneath my feet. I can stand on that rock in this moving current of river and still have myself. What I want to teach today is some wonderful tools for how to build those rock experiences, these rocks that we can stand on in the river of this mystery of love and life, and feel a sense of wholeness and connectedness.

Tools For Developing Rock Spaces

I don’t know and I don’t think any of us ever have an experience where the path across that river becomes one that we could just simply walk across. There are these places where the water is rushing and we can’t get through. If we’re lucky, there’s a rock that we could step on to of a sense of self, a memory of self, a tool that we’ve learned, something that we can do so that we can move further on the river, but there’s always this rushing river of not having ground to stand on and not knowing ourselves. That’s just so much a part of being human. By the experience of self-honoring, we can cultivate the experience of having rocks beneath our feet that we can step on in love. I’m going to share some tools for developing those kinds of rock spaces. I’m going to ask you to remember times when there wasn’t ground for you to stand on, that you figured out a way to create ground to stand on. That became a rock for you. What kind of wisdom tool that you had in your life? Guaranteed, every one of you has those. When we see what those are, they come together to form a mission of our deepest life lessons, the things that get us through the river of life with wisdom. I’m just going to share a few that I know, and that many people I know have experienced. I just want you to remember and we’re going to start with that experience of, “There’s not a rock for me to stand on here.” There’s not a steppingstone. There’s just a sense of not rightness, not “okayness”, emptiness, “flawedness”, brokenness. Have you ever been in a relationship and had a really bad feeling of suffocation, and then felt like, “What’s wrong with me? Why am I feeling suffocated? I should really be fine in this relationship. My partner is fine. Why do I feel like I can’t breathe? Why do I feel like there’s no air for me? Why do I feel like I want to flee?” Maybe a feeling of numbness where the other person is feeling, but you are kind of feeling nothing, and you feel bad that you’re feeling nothing. These are places that have been groundless places for me in my own intimacy journey. I’ve had to learn such important things about those places. Have you ever experienced those things? Highly sensitive people often feel a sense of suffocation or needing space.CLICK TO TWEETThe feeling of suffocation in an intimate relationship for me is a big one. When I learned about Elaine Aron‘s work with highly sensitive people, and I learned that highly sensitive people often feel that kind of sense of suffocation or needing space. That was really helpful for me to begin to understand who I was, when I realized and I could admit that my suffocation was a sign. It’s pretty obvious but to me, it just felt like a defect. It was a sign that I needed more space. Something was happening inside me or in my interaction with the other person where I literally didn’t have enough space, and I needed to somehow reclaim that sense of space. That insight gave me ground to stand on instead of just feeling like I am just so dysfunctional with love. That’s one example.

Feeling Reduced And Minimized

Have you ever felt that kind of sense of suffocation in a relationship and learned a skill, and actually through your interactions with yourself or the other person heal that, fix that and get past that? Just take a minute to think. Here’s another one. Feeling somehow “less than” because of who you are in an intimate relationship. That experience of feeling reduced, less than, minimized, maybe because you had a need that was not being met, or maybe because the other person was somehow degrading you, controlling you, somehow dishonoring you or not honoring you fully enough, or you were doing that yourself. That feeling of being less than, that horrible feeling of being less than. Have you ever experienced that and been able to get past it, get through it and get out of it?

What helped you do that? For me, one of the things that helped me was once again finding that it’s not that I was less than, it was that a part of me was somehow feeling diminished in the interaction, which made me feel bone-deep less than, but when I could acknowledge, “Here’s a valid piece of me that I need to actually be able to express and bring out not in a hostile, cruel way, but somehow make room for.” Have you ever had that experience where you grew enough to be able to make room for a part of yourself like that? What was that for you? What was that experience where you felt “less than”, and then you did something, and you were able to find ground beneath your feet, and stop feeling less than and feel like a whole being? These are memories of micro triumphs that become the building blocks for a life that we could live with a sense of wisdom and possibility and being able. This is from my book, Deeper Dating. I say that honoring the worth of our emotions, no matter what they are or how little, we or other people understand them, is a skill that changes the entire tenor of our lives. When we learn to honor our authentic experience, we discover the deep gift that lies in the heart of that experience, whatever it is. What I’m going to do now is I’m going to offer some big self-doubt questions, places where there’s not going to be ground beneath our feet when we’re self-doubting like this, and then I’m going to offer a self-honoring question that we can replace that with, that doesn’t just make us feel better, it helps us find self because those places where there’s no ground beneath our feet are places where we are not cherishing, honoring and feeling a sense of self. When we feel that sense of self, there's a sense of connectedness to the heart of the world.CLICK TO TWEETWhen we feel that sense of self, there’s a sense of connectedness to the heart of the world. When we feel that we’re somehow okay, because disconnectedness is the most painful state there is, that’s why solitary confinement is such a cruel and destructive punishment because it separates us from our sense of connectedness. There’s just nothing more terrible that could happen. Each of these questions, when you replace the self-doubt question with the self-honoring question, you will feel the glimmer of a sense of self, the solidity of a feeling of ground beneath your feet, the sense that there’s a path that you could take to move forward and where you want to go, and a connectedness to the good heart of the world. Here are some of those questions. What’s wrong with me for feeling this way? Think about a time that you have thought that and imagine replacing that with, in what way is this feeling actually really make sense, given who I am and what I care about, and what I’ve experienced, and why this matters to me?

Fear Of Other Peoples’ Opinions

When we ask that, we make room for our humanity. All of a sudden, it’s literally the feeling of ground beneath our feet. Here’s another one. What will people think of me? These are all such human ones, but I think you could sense that when you get lost in them, it’s just that feeling of a lack of ground beneath our feet. What will people think of me? The replacement for that is, what do I think of this? Whatever it is that I think or feel about this, how is that authentically a part of who I am? I remember a moment in therapy. I was with a therapist who, ultimately, I was not so thrilled with and was not a great therapist for me, but there was one thing that happened. I was in a relationship with the boss, and I talked a lot about what she thought of me and how she saw me. My therapist said to me, “Well, how do you see her?” I thought that that was a great question, but then she went further and she explained to me, “The minute you disconnect from your eyes and how you perceive the world, you will be prey to this experience of a terrible sense of vulnerability to how other people see you. The healing from that is the going back to what you see, and what you notice. The lack of being able to do that creates a vacuum inside, which always gets filled with masochistic situations where we over worry about what other people think of us.”

  Just pause for a moment and just say, “These are such rich tools of intimacy.” I would like for you to take a moment and think of a big lesson of intimacy, whatever it was, where there wasn’t ground beneath your feet, and you did something or said something or reached out to someone who really saw you and knew you, and you were able to go from that place of that bad state of just not having ground beneath your feet, not having a warm and good sense of positive self, and you did something that helped you find that. Just take a minute to remember that. What was that? What did you do and how might that be thematic for your life intimacy journey? Here’s another one. How can I fix this part of me because I am just not attractive as long as this part of me is not fixed? Here’s the replacement question. Here’s the wisdom question. The path that leads you to the heart and the worth of your humanity, and also to a lot of discovery, what does that part of me need now? How does that need actually make sense?

The Need To Toughen Up

Here’s another one. I need to toughen up. I am too sensitive. Just take a minute to think about the times that you may have felt that. What if that was replaced with, I’m actually not going to toughen up because this is how sensitive I am. This is what I feel. What if my strength was a more flexible strength that came from honoring that vulnerability, and then making choices that took care of it? Instead of trying to get rid of it, step on it, suppress it, bury it or make it tougher. It’s in that act of self-honoring, of finding the spaciousness to self-honor, the room to self-honor that so many of those deep and strange hole spots inside of us are healed and soothed and changed. That is about honoring self. That terrible painful space is about the dishonoring of self. It's in that act of self-honoring those deep and strange whole spots inside of us that we are healed, soothed, and changed.CLICK TO TWEET 

  I just want to read something from my book, Deeper Dating. “In the long run, it’s the act of honoring that is the antidote to our bewilderment and the path to our own unique genius. The act of self-treasuring may be challenging but ultimately, it’s the most comforting path of all. Every other path hurts. Everything else is broken glass, sharp brambles in our side. Honoring is the skill that enables us to live the beauty of our hearts and the mission of our gifts in the world. It requires giving up the whip we wield against ourselves. It requires a kindness, listening to our gifts”, which makes me think of those treasured, awesome, wonderful people in our lives who treat us that way, and how those people are gold for us. I just want to say that sometimes the river is really deep, really scary, really cascading and intense, and we can’t get across it. Sometimes there are times like that, and then we just need to stand there and honor and have awe for the vastness, the intensity of what’s going on there, and to be able to stand right where we are and be able to feel ourselves. I’ve been really inspired by someone very dear to me who was just diagnosed with cancer. Pretty significant situation and really difficult. I was talking to her and she said to me, “The first thing I had to do so that I could have myself back, what I needed to do was I needed to wrap my head around what the worst-case scenario could be.” She said, “That’s not for everybody but for me, I needed to do that so I could reclaim myself in the presence of this very big and scary thing.”

  I want to share with you something that she heard from a dear friend of hers. That dear friend who also had had cancer said that when she found out she had cancer, she said, “My first question was, am I going to live? If I am going to live, everything else is solely about adaptation. If I’m not going to live, then that as well is about adaptation.” I just thought this was so powerful. I had such honor and respect for this very dear person in my life. I want to close with just a sense of that amazing, earned experience of finding self when it sometimes can be so hard to find self. I want to acknowledge you and me, and all of us for those amazing wisdom tools that we have cultivated to help us find self in these difficult times because that is a treasure and that’s a treasure that doesn’t go away. That’s one of the great treasures of the intimacy journey. Thank you so much for reading. I look forward to connecting with you again on the next episode of the Deeper Dating Podcast.

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In this Deeper Dating Q& A episode, listeners bring their most important questions about love, sex, dating, and relationships to Ken and get his direct personal advice. Today, we’ll help you get past the pain of breakups, recognize attractions of deprivation more quickly, deal with painful aspects of healthy relationships, and more!

Table of Contents

• Healing From Attractions Of Deprivations
• Feeling Disappointments In Our Relationships
• Unworthy Of Love
• Unhealthy Relationships
• On Again Off Again Relationships

Deeper Dating Q&A: Expert Advice For All Your Questions About Love, Dating And Sex

Welcome to the Deeper Dating Q&A, where I answer your most pressing questions about love, sex and intimacy. I do this in a way that lets listeners apply these insights to the particulars of their own life. You’ll leave this episode with new possibilities and hopefully, some important revelations about your own love life. Stay tuned to the Deeper Dating Podcast. — Hello and welcome to the Deeper Dating Podcast. I’m Ken Page and I’m a psychotherapist. I’m the author of Deeper Dating and the Cofounder of DeeperDating.com, where single people can meet online in an environment that is fun, inspiring, warm and kind. Today, in this podcast, I’ll be answering your questions, and the questions this time seem to revolve a lot around the issue of attractions of deprivation and attractions of inspiration. In this and every episode, I’m going to share with you the greatest tools that I know to help you find love and discover a map to deeper love that you can keep flourishing while healing your life in the process. Because the skills of dating are the skills of love, and the skills of love are the greatest skills of all for a happy and rich life. If you want to learn more about the deeper dating path to real intimacy, just go to DeeperDatingPodcast.com. You can sign up for my mailing list and get free gifts and learn a lot more about how to use these ideas to transform your own intimacy journey, and you’ll also find transcripts of this entire episode. If you’re single, you can go to DeeperDating.com and explore there as well. Also, everything I share in this podcast is educational in nature. It’s not medical or psychiatric advice or treatment. If you’re experiencing any serious symptoms, please seek professional help. Finally, I’m so touched by the things people say about this podcast and the reviews people leave. I would really appreciate it if you like what you’re hearing here to leave a review and subscribe on iTunes or elsewhere. Thank you so much for that and let’s jump in. Pain is part of the pain of loving.CLICK TO TWEET—

Healing From Attractions Of Deprivations

The first question, “Hi, Ken. My name is Jace and thank you for all your hard work. I’ve gotten a lot of value out of your book and your podcasts. A subject that I don’t think you’ve addressed yet that I’m curious about is how to heal from attractions of deprivation. Assuming we’re doing the things that you recommend doing, dating with your Core Gifts, identifying attractions of deprivation early on, etc. What I’m curious about is when an attraction of deprivation still happens, what’s your recommendation on healing from that kind of breakup? Because attaching from attraction of deprivation feels worse and more difficult than others, even while knowing it was the right decision. Do you have any insights on this?” Thank you, Jace. I think that most of us, if not all of us, who are listening now know the pain of separating from or being separated from an attraction of deprivation. It does hurt and it is really, really difficult. I just want to talk about that a little bit. I guess the first thing that I want to say is that that pain is part of the pain of loving. Somehow, I think that if we use that pain and work with it, if we grow around that pain in whatever ways that we do, it will ultimately be a foundation. It’ll be a source of wisdom. It’ll be a turning point for us in our lives. If we don’t let ourselves feel that pain and that hurt and try to grow around that, it won’t be as useful. How do you do that? How do you honor the pain and try to grow? One piece, I think, is not to do it alone, but to do it with help and support. Thích Nhất Hạnh, the brilliant Vietnamese monk who was nominated by Martin Luther King for a Nobel Peace Prize. He said, “If you take a vial of ink and you pour it into a glass, it’s going to darken the entire glass. If you pour it into a river, not very nice to the river, but if you do that, it just gets absorbed.” That is an example. That explains how it’s just too bitter and hard to hold the pain ourselves. Look for wise friends. Look for friends with whom you can talk about this not once, not twice, but as much as you need to. You might want to do some trauma-based therapies. EMDR and brain spotting, those are two very powerful ones. AEDP is another one. Somatic Experiencing is another one. I’ve used EMDR with clients a lot and found it tremendously helpful. I also think that the simple technique called EFT or tapping, which you can find, I would suggest looking at Dawson Church’s work or Nick Ortner’s work or Jessica Ortner’s work. There are lots of people on YouTube where you can learn about EFT, which is a self-soothing technique that’s very powerful and very healing around trauma.

  I would say use perhaps one of these trauma techniques, talk about it in therapy. I know for me that going to Co-Dependents Anonymous helped me be able to breathe again when I went through a terribly, terribly painful breakup, and so did talking to the friends I care about who know me and love me. Another thing is to remember why you did it again and again to remember the reasons why you did it. Because you did it for a better future. The more you remind yourself of that, the more that that will help. Let this pain and let this decision be conscious so that it can become a milestone in your healing. Those are just some thoughts that I hope are helpful.

Feeling Disappointments In Our Relationships

The next question, this person says, “I find that women, a lot of times, process through things very quickly and with men, it takes a bit more time the way that our brains are wired. If a woman is asking a question on something, it’s a bigger, heavier question of how long to give the man space. I don’t want to insult the man. I want to trust him, but I know myself, I can forget things and get to multitasking, and then not give it the attention it needs to get back to the person. Also, how not to nag like if somebody says he’s going to take out the garbage on a Tuesday and it’s Monday night. Do you wait until like 8:00 at night before you say, ‘Hey, did you take out the garbage?’ or is it better just to let the garbage be forgotten and let that person, in a manner of speaking, have that consequence? What is the best route?” She says, “In my past, I was around more immature men, and those duties would fall to me when they didn’t pick up or they didn’t do what they said they were going to do. I want to not enable somebody to treat me that way. How do you respect them and call them up higher, in a sense? I really appreciate the knowledge and wisdom you bring. You’ve helped me learn so much and I’m really grateful to you.” Thank you so much for saying that. Just a couple of thoughts on this. On one level, I think it’s a universal issue the way that we so often feel disappointment in our relationship with things that matter to us, that maybe our partner doesn’t do as well as they need to. That’s a really, really universal thing, and it is better to not nag but to share your feelings. It’s better to say what you want, why it’s important to you, if you feel let down to share that as well. I think that’s a better way to do it. I just want to back up here for a second though and say that you’ve articulated a shift that’s happened for you, which is now you are somehow with men who are more mature. I’m imagining that this guy that you’re talking about is more mature than men that you have been with before. I want to acknowledge that and congratulations on that. That is growth and progress. We get prickly around the places where there are deep wounds.CLICK TO TWEETI know for me, with my husband, when I get annoyed or impatient around things that I want him to do or think he should do or he said he would do, etc., often I am humbled by the fact that just the remembering of all the things that he does that I don’t do that well and that I forget. I think it’s always good to take a step back and think of that, too. Might this be hitting a trigger for you that’s an early old trigger, just take the time to think about this in a rational way. What are the things that he does for you? What are the things that you do? If it ends up being pretty balanced, that’s going to make you feel better right there. Think broad scale the things that he does because he just picks them up, and the things that you do that you just pick them up, but if it’s bothering you, definitely speak about it. Say what you mean and mean what you say, but don’t say it mean. I think that these kinds of sticking points are ones that we all experience and they’re like very much about a building up of wisdom. If something’s bothering you and if it has historic roots, find a way to talk about it that is not “blamey”, but is more like an “I” statement. That’s really a key here. Let us know what happens. Thank you.

Unworthy Of Love

Okay, the next one. “Hey, there. I’d like to keep this question anonymous but my question to you is when you have a deep-rooted feeling of being unworthy of love, how do you make your wants and needs known without feeling like you’re going to make yourself appear less worthy because you expressed your wants and needs?” This is a beautiful, beautiful question. I think for those of us who have deep-rooted or have had deep-rooted feelings of being unworthy of love, which is actually a lot of us. When it comes time to make our wants and needs known, we don’t do it. So, three cheers for you, person who called in, because you are considering and planning to make those wants and needs known. That’s huge. That’s big. That’s really big. It’s like a breakthrough to be able to do that when you feel unworthy of love. When we do this, and it’s scary for us and it’s hard, we might feel really uncomfortable reverberations of shame or embarrassment. We might feel defenses or a kind of intense prickliness or making the assumption that your needs and wants are not going to be met. Maybe you get like a tiny indication of that that’s just not really fair to assume it, but it feels like it is and you assume you won’t get your wants and needs met.   You let annoyance out or irritation or you punish the person. These are all the things that happen because we get prickly around the places where there are deep wounds, and our wants and needs are some of those. What I would say is I wouldn’t worry so much about making your wants and needs known without feeling that you’ll make yourself appear less worthy because you expressed your wants and needs. I would say no that there will be pangs of those feelings, but the biggest thing, the most important thing here, to heal that, is to choose to be in the presence of people with whom when you do share your wants and your needs, they don’t shame you. They don’t gaslight you. They treat you with honor and value and they listen. If you find people like that, over time, this unworthiness of love feeling will diminish, but even with those people, you’re still probably going to have to go through this weird ring of fire where you feel less than, or you feel ashamed, or you just feel really frightened. When you’re with the right person, it’s like being a trapeze artist and leaping off into unknown, hoping that the other person is going to catch you and then they catch you. That is such a good feeling. To do this work of healing, you need to be around people who are capable of catching you, who know what it means that when someone expresses their needs and their wants in a non-blaming way, that that’s very, very precious and needs to be held with care. Those are the people who are gold. Those are the people who you want to be with. Those are my thoughts about that.

Unhealthy Relationships

Okay, this is a long one, but I think it’s a very poignant and important one. “Hey, Ken. I’m very thankful for your work and I went to trauma therapy, thanks to you. I became a much healthier person and realized my own strength. I approached a man online because I admired his morals from his post, and I thought he was a really generous person because he was taking care of his toxic and suicidal ex-girlfriend for six years. I wanted to love him the way he deserved to be love, and we had what I thought was a wonderful online relationship and attraction of inspiration. We grew together for two months and made each other better people. We were completely ourselves and could communicate about anything. We lived in different countries. We couldn’t meet because of COVID, but we both said we were willing to wait. Then he went to his ex’s house to pick up a few things, and it was obvious from his behavior afterwards that he cheated on me with her, but he didn’t tell me. He started to behave in a really odd way from his guilt, pulling away from me, and without telling me why. Seeing what he did wrong and crying, wanting to believe in my love at times, wanting to get away from it until he broke up with me. He mentioned his reasons, the distance and difference in cultures, which before the infidelity, it didn’t seem like either of us had a problem with. Be with someone who is going to do their very best to tell the truth, be kind, caring, and respectful even when it's hard.CLICK TO TWEETOur attraction of inspiration made us both into better people, but it turned into an attraction of deprivation from his infidelity. I’m not sure if we lived together if he would have been faithful or truthful after all. I think his character was tested and we both realized that he was not as good a person as he thought he was. Is there any way I could have known he would betray me like this for those two months? Because in that time, he made me feel safe and he was the best relationship that I’ve had so far. I really didn’t see the end coming. I’m wondering if the fact that he was taking care of a toxic person for so long was in fact a red flag instead of a sign of generosity. This was a shock and I don’t want it to happen to me again. Thank you.” This is very poignant and moving. Congratulations on the work that you’ve done and the growth that you’ve had. What happens when we do that work is we begin to up-level the people we met, and this guy had some real problems. We’ll talk about that in a minute, but you experienced a deep up-leveling. So often, it works that way that as we learn these lessons, we go through kind of stepping stone relationships that are signs of our growth. They’re markers of our healing and our journey. They’re better and they feel closer to being attractions of inspirations, but they’re not enough. This was certainly one of those cases. It sounds heartbreaking. I am acknowledging you for the progress, and you’re right, you do want to be more aware of red flags. I think that, and as you’re beginning to see, I just want to point some of these out. He was taking some care of someone who was toxic, which I assume means abusive, in some ways, as well as suicidal for six years. This is not someone who he went through this for a brief little time. He was deeply, deeply engaged. I would say in a situation like that, there is a red flag and there is a risk. If somebody is with someone like that for six years, there is a discussion to be had about that. I don’t know if you would have been able to know this, but there was definitely a romantic obsession, a relationship with her that had a compulsive quality to it. It was not good in those ways. I also have to say that he wasn’t that honest about it. Yeah, there were some character issues there, and I would encourage you to go back and think, “Was this a guy who, like, when he could have told the truth without too much difficulty, he fudged it a little bit? He wasn’t as honest as he could be. Might he have been in touch with this person?” Just in retrospect, do you see that there were ways that you actually didn’t feel full trust because of some of his actions, but couldn’t really put your finger on what it was? I would say those things are really important to look at.

  Sometimes, we end up in really unhealthy relationships and we stay for really long times, but that does mean that there’s something to look out for there. That does mean that there’s something that needs healing or at least needs addressing in the relationship. My heart goes out to you. I support you for the beautiful work you’ve done so far with him, and I encourage you in your next relationship, and this is for everyone, be with someone who in your gut you know that even when it’s hard, this person is going to do their very best to tell the truth, to be kind, to be caring and to be respectful. Thank you so much for sharing this.

On Again Off Again Relationships

Here’s the last question. “Hi, Ken. My name is Tiffany and I just want to say thank you so much for creating such great content on your podcast and your amazing book.” Thank you, Tiffany. “I want to learn more about your opinion regarding on again and off again relationships. I’ve been with my ex on and off, and this is our second time being on and off. It seems like the biggest issue is our vision of the future. I eventually want to get married and I obviously don’t know who it’s going to be with yet, but I want to date someone who has the same vision as me. For him, he doesn’t know if he wants to get married, and he does not think we should base our relationship on a means to an end. I see marriage as a way for me to receive security and stability. In some ways, I had a pretty unstable childhood, so it was my way of getting stability in childhood and recreating the family I didn’t have. For him, he’s not at that stage of life where he’s thinking about marriage. He started a company and he thinks I’ve been pushing a lot for intimacy that mimics a marriage, and it causes a lot of unhappiness on my end or I’m pushing for more intimacy, and he’s pushing for more space for work. I wanted to learn more about your opinion on this. Is there a way to repair this or a way to move forward? We both mentioned we don’t want to end the relationship again, but we really don’t see a path.” Tiffany, I want to make some assumptions here that may be accurate or inaccurate, but here they are. Something that I noticed in the way that you presented this was that you kind of pathologized your need for commitment. You explained it as coming from a dysfunctional family, and then you explained his, very clearly, what he didn’t like about you pushing for intimacy that mimics a marriage. To me, there was a lot of explaining why this really could be an issue on your part, and not really even looking if that might be the case for him because he just wants to work more. He’s starting a company. Underneath your desire lies really important pieces of your Core Gifts.CLICK TO TWEETI noticed an imbalance there. There was kind of more self-critique, it felt like, and I just want to say this, your desire for marriage and stability may be linked in different ways to an unstable childhood and the desire to create a family in a sense of stability that you didn’t have. Fine. It’s still your desire, and it’s a fair desire, and it’s a good desire. There are men out there who want the same thing. It is okay to want to feel the safety of stability, monogamy and marriage. It is not for everybody, but you have every right to not have to pathologize it. I just noticed, and I wondered if he’s giving you a little bit of a message that you were desire for that kind of thing maybe isn’t quite as healthy or free or liberated as his, and that maybe you should shift a little bit to just be looser and freer and all of those kinds of things. I would say that I don’t really like that. I don’t think that’s so great in all honesty, if that is happening. Maybe he’s not doing that and you’re just doing it to yourself. Even if that’s the case, I want to really encourage you to know that you have a right to want marriage and stability and a family. Those are good and great things. He has a right not to want that yet, but that doesn’t mean that it has to be this pathology of yours. In a situation like this where two people have something that they really, really care about, and it has deep, deep roots, and they feel differently, it’s a complex thing, but the most important ingredient is that both of you make space for the way the other one is feeling. In Harville Hendrix‘ Imago therapy, which is a brilliant, brilliant school of couples therapy, what they would say is that underneath your desire for connection and stability in marriage, and underneath his desire for freedom and space, lies really important pieces, your Core Gifts and his Core Gifts. If you both can speak and really listen and make space for the other one’s needs, and do this amazing act of really hearing and knowing how true this is for the other person, it might help you to move on. If you feel really stuck, get help. Get couple’s therapy. If he feels like that’s too much like marriage and you’re not getting through this, that’s like a marker of a real problem if he’s not willing to do that. I would recommend that because, in therapy, you both can do the deeper listening. I have known couples that have had differences that seemed irreconcilable, but because they loved each other and cared about each other so much, they found a way to reconcile them. I have known that to happen. I’ve been very inspired by those stories, but it takes a deep, deep level of honesty, truth and experimentation. If the two of you can do that without pathologizing each other, then that is wonderful. What I would say is most of us need help with that, and I want to offer a fabulous resource. Harville Hendrix and Helen LaKelly Hunt are two brilliant, brilliant thought leaders in this field. They have taken the concept of Imago therapy and all of their decades of work in the field, and distilled it down to a process that anybody can learn to listen and communicate in deeper ways. This distills the essence of so much of the Imago therapy work that I love so much. You can go to SafeConversations.com and you can learn more about how you can learn this technique of deeper listening, which is life-changing. It’s hard work but man, it’s amazing. Especially in an arena like this, I believe something like that is incredibly helpful. If you can’t do it yourselves, get some help. Go to therapy and get some support. I think that’s really important, but don’t pathologize your desire to want to get married and have stability. Those are good and beautiful things. Thank you, all. I know this was a much longer than usual episode and I still have a lot more questions that I need to catch up with, and I will in a few more episodes. Thank you all for listening and I look forward to connecting with you again on the next episode of the Deeper Dating Podcast.

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Addiction in all its forms has powerfully impacted so many of our lives. In this episode, I interview Dr. Rob Weiss, the world-renowned expert on addiction and love. If you’ve ever struggled with issues of addiction in the lives of the people you love–or even in your own life–then I truly encourage you not to miss this episode.

Table of Contents

• Being In A Relationship With An Active Addict
• Sex Addiction: Do You Have One?
• Being In A Relationship With A Porn Addict
• Codependence Versus Prodependence
• The Next Steps

Addiction And Love: An Interview With Rob Weiss, Ph.D.

A Compassionate New Understanding

If you have questions or concerns about addiction of all sorts and its impact on you, your family, and your relationship, this is an interview you shouldn’t miss. Today, I talked to Dr. Rob Weiss, a world-renowned expert on addiction and relationships, and what he has to say simply should not be missed. Stay tuned to this episode of the Deeper Dating Podcast. — Hello, everybody, and welcome to the Deeper Dating Podcast. I’m Ken Page and I’m a psychotherapist. I’m the author of the book Deeper Dating and the Cofounder of DeeperDating.com, a new platform for people to meet in a way that is kind, respectful and based on the real principles of deeper intimacy that I speak about on this podcast. I’m so excited today because I’m going to be interviewing my good friend, Dr. Rob Weiss, who is a globally renowned expert in the treatment of adult intimacy disorders and related addictions. We’re going to be speaking about addiction and how that impacts our relationship lives, our lives as a whole, and how we can address issues of addiction in our relationships. This week and every week, I’m going to share with you the greatest tools that I know to help you find love and keep it flourishing, and heal your life in the process because the skills of dating are nothing more than the skills of intimacy, which are the greatest skills of all for a happy, meaningful life. If you want to learn more about the deeper dating path to real intimacy, just go to DeeperDatingPodcast.com. You can sign up for my mailing list and receive some free gifts and learn more about using these ideas to transform your own intimacy journey. I also want to say that everything I share and that Rob shares in this podcast is educational in nature. It’s not medical or psychiatric advice. Finally, if you like what you’re hearing and learning here, it would be wonderful if you could subscribe and leave me a review. Thank you so much for that and let’s dive in. Let me tell you a little bit about Rob and the work that he does. Dr. Weiss is the Chief Clinical Officer of Seeking Integrity Treatment Centers, working with sex, porn, and drug-addicted men. He’s an expert in the treatment of adult intimacy disorders and related addictions, most notably sex, porn, and relationship addictions. He’s a 25-year addiction specialist and a clinical sexologist, and a practicing psychotherapist. He’s created intimacy-focused clinical treatment programs in the United States, around the world, and for the US military. He’s also a subject matter expert for major media, including CNN, The New York Times, and Newsweek, among others. He is the author of ten books, among which are Prodependence: Moving Beyond Codependency, Sex Addiction 101, Out of the Doghouse and Cruise Control among others. He’s also a weekly writer for Psychology Today. His blog Love and Sex in the Digital Age has had over eighteen million readers to date. His wonderful podcast, which I’m excited that I’m going to be appearing on or maybe by this point, will have appeared on already, which is ‎Sex, Love, & Addiction, was rated as a Top 10 US addiction podcast with over 550,000 downloads since 2019. It’s deeply impressive. When we speak, you will have a much richer understanding of why that is. Rob, I’m so glad to have you on the show. Hey, Ken. I’m glad to be here.

Rob, I think that this is such an important subject, and it’s not one that we have covered much in detail in this podcast. Although I do speak about the issues that come up when we are in a relationship with someone who has an active addiction or if we do ourselves. I would love to just hear your general thoughts for this audience, for anybody who is struggling with being in a relationship where there is some form of addiction. Either their partner, they have a sense that their partner has some form of addiction or that they sensed that they do, and are troubled and trying to figure out what to do next. Very globally, if you could just share some thoughts to help us dive in. I think you are starting with loved ones, partners, family members. When you have someone in your life who’s addicted, you understand that addicts are very clever, especially when it comes to doing everything they can to be secretive and hide their addiction. Ken, we were talking about this earlier, and I actually think that it is very hard for someone close to a loved one to know that there’s an addiction until they run straight into it. If you see the heroin, if you find the bottles hidden all over the house, if you see all the bills for the sex workers and the porn, then you’ve got some information that tells you, “Wow. There’s a lot more going on here than maybe I thought about, or maybe at least we need to talk about it.” Addicts tend to live in a very secret world that is separate from their day-to-day life. I think the things you would most see are things like they lose time. They say they’re going somewhere and they’re not there. They tell you they’re going to be home at a certain time, then when they’re not, they say, “Well, I never said that time.” They lie. They manipulate the beliefs of those close to them to feel like they’re wrong. In other words, this is frog in the boiling water metaphor. I think that’s a lot of families and spouses of addicts where things start out not so great, and then they get worse and worse and worse, but the person becomes adapted to it. It’s almost easier for the neighbor to see that your husband is a drunk than it is for you sometimes. You are articulating one particular quality here as well, which is dishonesty, a lack of integrity. Would you say that’s true? This is why I named my treatment program, Seeking Integrity. Integrity comes from the word integration. Integration is to be one person without secrets, without surprises. To be an addict is to be disintegrated, that you have different parts of your life in different places and they never meet. I think the secret life of an addict is often well hidden. Sometimes it can be your next-door neighbor who sees that your husband is a drunk before you do, because partners are often in kind of a frog in the boiling water situation where things are getting worse and worse and worse, but they’re used to it, and they’re used to it, and they’re used to it, and sometimes they don’t see the problem in front of them. It’s so easy to want to believe your partner. Just believe them even though something doesn’t feel right. It’s so easy to make that choice even though it may not be the wisest choice, and with addicts, that happens a lot. To be an addict is to be disintegrated; you have different parts of your life in different places, and they never meet.CLICK TO TWEETKen, you have to think about the fact that we all want to believe that those closest to us have our back, that their primary thing in the world when they go out there is to do whatever they need to do, but to not do anything that will hurt us, that will let us down or that they know would cause harm to our families. That’s what addicts do routinely. They do things all the time that are going to hurt their families, hurt their loved ones, hurt themselves, and they don’t talk about it. It’s kept a secret. It really isn’t found out until the partner runs into some major issue. Rob, what would you say about someone who’s in a relationship? They don’t necessarily know that there is an addiction issue. They don’t have kind of palpable proof of that, but they see a pattern of dishonesty, and that they know, that they recognize. I think you trust your gut. Every partner I’ve ever worked with and family members said, “There’s something not right. They seem disconnected. They seem to be in places where they didn’t say they were going to be. I’m hearing hints that they left work earlier.” You just get bits and pieces. I think, for people close to the addict, they feel the sense that something is not right, and they feel little pieces of it in different areas, but they can’t quite put their finger on it. One thing I wanted to say to you, Ken, is that when we love somebody, we don’t ever want to think badly of them. We will work hard to not think badly of the people we love because they’re the ones who are closest to us. I think of the mom who’s, God forbid, her kid killed five people. They say to the mom, “Hey mom, we’re really sorry to say but your kid did this.” The first thing mom says is, “Not my kid. There’s no way. He would never do anything like that. He’s a good kid.” That’s because when you’re close to someone, you don’t want to and can’t see some of what’s going on, but I’ll tell you what. Your next-door neighbor is going to see it when you can’t. Rob, let’s talk about sex addiction some here. Let’s talk about people who are listening to the show, who are wondering, “Might I have some sex addiction or porn addiction? I do feel like I watch porn too much. I do feel like I lose time doing that, but it doesn’t really get in the way of my life in any really big ways. It concerns me. I don’t know how it’s going to affect my sex life with my partner or my dating life. I just don’t know. I feel a little funny about it, but I’m not sure how to evaluate it.” I would just love to hear any of your thoughts about how to evaluate when something is sex addiction or porn addiction. What are the different levels of harm? How should we evaluate that in our own lives for everyone who’s wondering?

I think in terms of addiction in general, what you said was really useful. You said, “I don’t know if I have a problem. I can’t see whether it’s really affecting my life or not.” The thing is, when you are an addict or you’re someone who is hiding things from others, you’re also hiding things from yourself. Work might diminish a little bit. Your relationship might diminish a little bit, your time with your kids, whatever it is. You may not see it as like you said, “I don’t know whether I’m an addict or not because my life hasn’t completely fallen apart.” Well, it may be falling apart in a whole bunch of ways that you don’t see or you don’t want to see, but someone else might step in and say, “You know what? I’m concerned about this.” I guess that might be the first thing is have people show concern about your sexual behavior, your romantic behavior, you’re drinking, you’re using. Have other people said, “Gee, I’m a little worried about this and you don’t pay any attention?” Have you found yourself saying, “I’m going to stop looking at this porn. It’s in the way,” or “I’m going to stop drinking,” or whatever it is and then found that, “Gosh, darn it,” a week later, you were back at it again? Even though you make promises to yourself and you made them to other people, you couldn’t keep them. That’s a really big sign of addiction. Another one is consequences. “I’m going to have somebody at work find out. I’m going to have an arrest. I’m going to have a DUI. I’m going to get a disease.” Despite that, “I’m just going to fix the little problem that that caused and go back to the behavior.” I mean healthy people say, “Wow. Look what that behavior caused. I’m not going to do that again.” Addicts say, “How can I keep doing that thing without it becoming more of a problem?” That’s beautiful and a really important point. Specifically, now let’s just talk about porn addiction. What are the markers that you have crossed over? In addition to the one that you just said that you’ve crossed over to a place where harm is happening, and what is the harm that happens in a relationship where one of the partners has a porn addiction? Let me say a couple of things. Before you get to partners, let’s talk about how it affects the individual. A couple of things, there are different kinds of people who have porn problems. To be really honest, I don’t use the word porn addict because we don’t really have a diagnosis called that. We don’t really have research that speaks to who is a porn addict and who isn’t. This is part of the problem, Ken, is that people can have all kinds of problems related to porn. For example, they can become isolated and not go out in the world and not be socializing and not be dating. For some men, they can lose their ability to have erections. They can lose their ability and interest in being sexual with other adult human beings. You are as strong today as your connections and relationships, not just your ability to succeed.CLICK TO TWEETPorn abuse, if you will, can affect your life in a whole variety of ways, but they basically have to do with you don’t show up for your life because you’re too busy spending hours and hours at home with your porn or wherever you are. I think there’s something else too. That problems with porn, a couple of things, it’s easier to use that word, they can come from various things. Someone might have a mental health disorder and they’re manic. They’re going to be crazy around porn. Someone might have ADD or OCD, other mental health issues that involve the same part of the brain as compulsivity and impulsivity. They may think they have an addiction, but it might more be a mental health problem. There are many places that this problem we call porn addiction can come from, but people need different kinds of help. For example, there’s a young person who started looking porn when they were 9 or 11. They looked at it all the way through high school. Now they’ve gotten through it and they haven’t built social relationships. They’re not dating, and they’ve gotten further and further away from having a life because of the porn, but maybe when they were younger, when they were 6, 8, 10, 12, 15, they had a life. Their life is diminished because of the porn. There are others who really have an addiction problem related to sex and it isn’t just porn. They’re also engaged in sex workers and cam people online, and they’re going on apps. They have more broad problems with porn. There are even folks who, let’s say, have strong moral or religious objections to porn, but they can’t help but look at it. They hate themselves even if they look a few times because they feel it’s so against their values and beliefs. Some of those people call themselves addicts simply because their sexual behavior goes against their values and beliefs. There is no one thing I would call a porn addict, but it certainly comes down to the time you spend, the reduction of your intimacy in your relationships, the isolation. I’ve got to say that of all the people I work with sexual problems, porn addicts are the most ashamed. They are the most embarrassed, the men in particular, because who wants to be that guy who’s sitting around by yourself masturbating to porn and not having relationships, not being sexual with people, being isolated with the porn? Nobody wants to be that guy or gal. Or being in a relationship and knowing it’s creating a wall between you and your partner. It’s interesting, Ken. I’ve worked with recently a whole bunch of people who have had porn problems often into their relationships. They come to treatment at Seeking Integrity and they are 45, and they have been lying about their porn use to their spouses for twenty years. Their spouse may have caught a little. They saw it. The person promised, “I won’t look at it as much,” or “It’s no big deal,” or whatever they said, but slowly, the intimacy went out of the relationship. Slowly, they became less and less sexual. Slowly, he or she couldn’t figure out where their partner is disappearing to. When in fact, they’re losing them to porn use or any addiction that happens to be going on. Now let’s talk about people who are aware that their partner has a porn addiction, a little guidance about what to do, how to handle that, how to address it. I think with every addict, you have to be direct and talk about what’s true for you. One of the things that I think partners and family members are often fearful of is, “Oh my goodness. If I confront this person, if I challenge this person, if I really get upset about this, maybe they’ll use more. Maybe they’ll look at more porn.” In other words, “Maybe I will be the cause of the problem by challenging them.” The truth is and it’s something that I want everyone out there to hear is that no partner, no family member, no friend can ever be responsible for someone else’s using or sexual acting out or gambling or whatever the problem is. “You can make me miserable. You can hate me. You can make my life a living hell, and I can go play cards. I can divorce you. I can go get therapy. My choice to drink or use or sex or gamble or whatever it is when I am upset, that’s my choice.” What partners often run into is they are doubting themselves. They’re wondering what they’re doing wrong. Partners often turn on themselves, families too. They say, “What’s wrong with me that this person is doing this? Is there something I can do to make it different?” When, in fact, it really is the person with a problem who is the only person who can come up with the motivation to make it different. Partners and family members can confront. They can tell their truth. They can express their concerns. They can show their concerns but ultimately, it’s up to that family member to decide, “What do I do with this addict in my life, and how do I want to live my life with this person in it?” There’s so much in what you said just now. I think one piece of it is that terrible kind of tyranny that emotional blackmail of, “If I change, this person will be better. If I don’t get angry, if I do this or don’t do that, this person will behave differently.” Addicts absolutely love to put those exact forms of blame on their partners, which makes it really hard. That brings us to the area of codependency. There’s so much talk about codependency, so much speaking about codependency. In your book about prodependency, you’ve developed a whole different set of theories. I’d love to hear about those theories and how they relate to anybody who’s in a relationship with someone who might have an addiction. The problem with an addict is that you’re giving and loving into an empty well.CLICK TO TWEETAs you know and as you mentioned, Ken, I’ve worked in addictions and been licensed for over 25 years. I’ve worked in so many treatment centers and so many environments and set them up and created them. One of the constant concerns that I hear from family members is, “I don’t feel like I fit this model. I don’t think I did anything wrong that caused this person to have their addiction. I don’t think there’s anything I could do to make them.” In other words, they’re getting a sense I think in relations to shifts in our culture that the person with the problem is the person who is responsible, and the people around them are reacting to the problem. Codependency says, “What’s wrong with me for getting involved with this person? Am I just playing out all my own trauma and staying with them my past issues? Am I enabling this person in whatever they’re doing because I’m not doing whatever I should be doing? Could I cause it?” Codependency asks us to look at our history, our family experiences and say, “What’s wrong with me that I ended up with this person who’s an addict, that I stayed with this person who’s an addict? If I were to make that choice again after lots of therapy and trauma work, would I choose this person?” I just think why in the world would you want to make somebody in a relationship who’s tried so hard to maybe get this person sober or to stop their behavior or to live with it? All of a sudden, you’re going to turn around to this person when they’ve done everything they can to make it better. Instead of saying to them, “Good for you for hanging in there. Wow. I’m really impressed.” Anyone who’s willing to love such a troubled person is my hero. Ken, if someone had cancer, my partner had cancer, and I was dealing with that and working three jobs and giving up my life, you would bring me casseroles, but if for some reason my partner is an addict, and I’m giving up my jobs and not recreating, doing everything I can to save my family, you have nasty names for me like codependent. I just think that is number one, it doesn’t mirror where we are in the therapy world today, which is much more about attachment and connections. I am as strong today as my connections and my relationships, not just my ability to succeed. Partnerships and healthy partnership, as you know, as you talk about in Deeper Dating, is what it’s all about. Why would we tell people there’s something wrong with partnering with this person? There’s something wrong with staying with this person, and that if you don’t fix yourself, you’re going to end up with another person like that. None of that seems productive to me to helping a family heal because what it does to people who have done nothing in my belief, but try to love the person who is troubled and ill in their family, who’s tried to do their absolute best to heal them. By the way, most people don’t go to school to learn how to work with addictions. If they marry an addict, they don’t know how to help. They might bring the battles home. They don’t know how. They’re just doing the best they can. For us to turn to them and say, “Gee, I understand you didn’t want to lose your loved one. You did everything you can, but it’s really about what’s wrong with you,” to me, it is counterintuitive. By the way, family members don’t like it. There is a new way of looking at this, and it has to do with taking a step back and saying, “What if there’s nothing wrong with the people who love an addict? What if there’s nothing wrong with people who love someone who’s mentally ill? What if they simply got involved with someone they loved and adored and appreciated, then that person got sicker and sicker, and they didn’t know how to help, they did everything they could to make the situation better, but addicts are only ready when they’re ready?”

When the person finally goes to get help, what I believe under Prodependence is that people need validation and support for everything they’ve given and everything they’ve done. I would never pick apart someone who’s in a crisis. I would never diagnose someone who’s in a crisis, not as codependent or as anything. By the way, let me just say this before I stop my rant, codependency despite the 370 pop culture books that have been written about, it has never been validated in our research. Codependency does not exist in any of our diagnoses. I can’t bill insurance for it. It’s been 35 years, and we don’t have the research. We don’t have a diagnosis. There are 370 books written about it. Which is the right one? Because we have no diagnosis. We have no criteria for codependency. As far as I’m concerned, it is a pop-culture notion that arose in the 1980s and became hugely encouraging to women to become more independent of men because that’s what the whole thing was about in the 1980s is women becoming more independent. The reality is that that is not interdependence. It’s anti-dependence. We want to encourage people to be dependent on each other, to be intimate with each other, to know that that person’s got my back. I think, Ken, we also need to know that we need other people to survive, especially that one person who we lean into, and don’t tell me there’s ever anything wrong with me loving the people that I love. That was amazing and powerful. I got a bunch of thoughts and questions about that. First of all, I just want to acknowledge your compassion, and this very key point, which is something that I also talk about a lot in relation to codependency, is that there is a Core Gift there, which is a gift of generosity and loyalty. The people who are called codependent are the most generous and loyal people that you could find, often, yes, to their detriment, but to miss that gift at the center of all of this is to miss the most important part of all. That love and generosity of spirit and loyalty, which probably needs help to mature and get legs and stand up and honor itself, but the first step wouldn’t be beating someone down and pathologizing them. It would be acknowledging this primal gift of generosity and loyalty. I love what you’re saying. You said, Ken, that sometimes partners, family members love and are generous to their own detriment. What I would say about that is they don’t know. They’re just doing the best they can, and they’re giving and giving and giving and loving and loving. The problem is that with an addict, you’re giving and loving into an empty well. There’s nothing there for it. There’s no resonance. People start to blame themselves because their love, their attention, and their affection isn’t healing the person they love, when all along, their love and affection could have never healed that person. They have an emotional problem called addiction. I love what you’re saying. I love the compassion inherent in what you’re saying. What it makes me want to ask next is, so people who identify with these concepts that have been called codependency, where you give up yourself for another person, where you throw yourself in front of the tracks to save another person, but they still do the same thing again and again, the dishonoring of self that can go with it, all of the pieces that go with a situation where you don’t honor the other person’s adult right of choice. There are so many pieces. I don’t even know how to begin to articulate it, but whatever it is, all of those different parts of the constellation. What would you say to someone who recognizes some of those things in themselves after they’ve acknowledged how hard they’re trying, how much they care? Once they acknowledge that, what are the next steps to be able to continue growing? Relationships fail, even bad ones.CLICK TO TWEETI think they need to get help. If I have a problem and I can’t solve it, if I can’t fix the leak under my sink, I’m not going to say, “Well, maybe if I try tomorrow, I’m going to get somebody to help me.” If you can’t solve the problem of addiction or mental health in someone you love, and you’ve done your very best, I guess you need help. I never say to somebody, “You shouldn’t have done this. You shouldn’t have done that,” in the process of helping someone who’s an addict. I will say, “You did your very best. Unfortunately, you didn’t study addiction healing in high school, and you don’t know how to heal your partner, despite all the energy, but if we do it together, I bet I’ll have a lot of solutions and ideas that will be able to help both of us get where you want that person to go.” Rather than asking the partner to examine themselves and look at themselves, what if they just get help? By the way, the issue for partners and loved ones is they lose self-care. We say, “Well, that’s pathology. Why do they stop taking care of themselves?” The answer is because they love somebody. That person is failing. Every one of us who love, deeply love a family member, a sister, a brother, a child, we would absolutely give up ourselves if we’re healthy to help support them. That’s what love is. That’s what family independency is. Why would we, as under codependency, ever blame someone? Back to self-care, I do think that once I or someone is helping or a professional is helping someone deal with the addiction problem, part of dealing with that is saying to the person, “You might take a night off. Maybe you should get someone to hang out at your house so that your spouse doesn’t go out driving and drinking. You can take a yoga class.” In other words, we slowly weave in the idea that the person who loves the troubled person needs to begin to refocus on themselves, not at the detriment of the relationship, not saying, “I have to leave or pull back from the relationship, but I have to take better care of myself as any caregiver of someone who’s medically sick would have to do.” Beautiful. I think this thing of getting help is so hugely important, and that help needs to include a community of support in some way. A therapist is wonderful and important once a week or maybe twice a week, and that kind of community of people that you can reach out to is also a really huge thing. Just to share a story of mine, a personal story, I was dating somebody with who I was cataclysmically in love with. It was a complete revelation. That’s not the right word for love. That’s not supposed to be the right word for love.

It wasn’t a kind of really healthy love at all. In the slightest, it was what I call an attraction of deprivation, but it was one that cracked me open and changed my life because it was such a revelation in so many ways. There were really good parts to what I learned. Anyway, the relationship ended, and the pain that I experienced was so intense. I mean, I felt like I literally could not catch my breath. Somebody recommended that I went to a Codependence Anonymous meeting. I remember going to that meeting, and it provided me with a completely different angle on things because it asked me to look at the ways in which I gave up on myself, focusing on getting this person to love me. I literally had the experience of oxygen coming back into my being. Somehow my being was allowed to breathe again with that insight. Those meetings were amazingly helpful for me and really important. In this whole arena of addiction, I just want to acknowledge and make space for twelve-step work, which as a psychotherapist and as someone who’s had a lot of addiction in my family, I have seen heal so many lives in addition. I will tell you that all over the world, people are starting Prodependence Anonymous meetings because they want to be in rooms where the fact that they gave and loved and gave of themselves is considered a gift and not a fault. Ken, even in your situation, what you described is not what I would call love. I would disagree with this. You said, “We love the person so that we are loved.” I think we love people because we love them. Whether that man was available to you or not, you loved him and you wanted to have a relationship, and you might have been more available than this other person was. Maybe the choices that you made and you’re attempting to get something from a stone really is about you, but the fact that you might have cared for this person, that you might have been needful, that you might have hoped they would meet your dreams, I think that’s human. I also think our relationships fail, even bad ones. We grieve them. We’re sad. We miss them. Even the abusive people we miss, because they’re our most recent experience of deep and meaningful attachment, even if they hurt us. I understand how codependency can bring a different light to people over time, but I’m interested in the first six months or the first year when someone is finally looking at their partner’s addiction, or that partner finally gets sober, or they’ve left that partner. I’m interested when they’re in a crisis around addiction, how do we treat them? What do we call them? Because people who are wanting personal growth, I think as you described, they can read books, they can go to therapy, they can go to twelve-step meetings, and they can grow if they wish. I believe people who are involved with an addict just want to get back where they were. They just want things to be okay again. I actually think that to impose personal growth on people is abusive because most people just want to get back to the way it was. Who said it was my job to make them more functional, better people? If people seek that, that’s great, but if all they’re seeking is to tolerate, get past, live with and hopefully, heal someone’s addiction so that they can begin to heal themselves, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with them at all. Intimacy is created when you take the risk of revealing yourself to others.CLICK TO TWEETYou’ll like this. I wrote a chapter in Prodependence called 2s Don’t Marry 7s. What that means is if you’re emotionally a 2, you’re going to look at a 7 or an 8 emotionally. You’re going to say, and I hear this all the time, “They’re so boring. I don’t want to date someone that boring,” but they’re the healthy person. Then if you’re a 2 or 3, that 8 or 9, that healthy person looks at you and says, “Oh my God, too much drama. I don’t want to date that person.” I actually do believe that people of a similar emotional level with similar emotional issues, will be drawn together. I think that’s a good thing provided both members of the relationship are working on themselves. They’re going to twelve-step meetings. They have self-awareness. They’re in therapy. I can date or be in a relationship with anyone. I can love anyone as long as they are willing to be accountable for their part of the relationship. I can love an addict. I can love a troubled person as long as they keep their side of the street clean and can own their part. I can only not be in a relationship with someone who makes me wrong all the time for bringing things up, for talking about things, for asking things to get better. Troubled people, I think actually two 2s together or two 3s together have the possibility of becoming a 5 together. This idea that codependency has that we need to separate and distance and not be in a relationship in order to heal, I just don’t agree with or believe in. We might have some different beliefs about that, but as you know I don’t believe in codependency. I think that’s a cruel name for people who deeply love, and are now being blamed for the love that they have given. You can say that someone loved the wrong person. You can say that someone loved someone who couldn’t give love back. You can say that somebody loved into a situation which is only going to cause them harm. You can say that you can love people who will never love you back, but the love itself, and the giving itself, and the choosing, there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s just that the person you choose has not gotten past some of their troubles or isn’t willing to look at themselves, then the couple won’t grow, but if both members of the couple are willing to grow, I believe that individuals can grow faster in coupleship than they do as individuals, but that’s me. I think we certainly agree on a few of those points and including the major ones, but I think that there are very few 2s I feel like if you are a 2 or a 3 using this construct who can take responsibility for yourself, and not blame the other person, and be willing to and want to grow, then you wait no 2. You are like a 6 or above because that is a treasured quality. It’s a huge quality. It demands a huge amount of integrity. I think that there’s some line where if both parties are willing to do the work, even if deeply imperfectly, I agree. I think that’s a glorious thing, but I think that that takes a certain level of self-acknowledgment. I don’t think that happens easily with an addict who is active, for example. Right, but I would never get in a relationship with an active addict until they were sober and looking at themselves.

I agree with that. This is the wisdom of the partners looking for love. I would say this constantly, “Go find a broken person. Great, but make sure they’re working on themselves. Make sure they have a language for it.” You’re going to find a broken person anyway because you’re broken, and you’re going to find somebody at your same level of functioning. Find someone who really works for you, but make sure that they’re already sober. Make sure they’re already working on themselves. In that way, you can grow together. That’s a huge point. I really agree with this. The choice not to enter into a relationship with someone who has an active addiction is an essential choice. This is something that I say all the time is that if you or your prospective partner has an untreated, unstabilized, serious-psychiatric disorder or an active addiction, it’s better not to commit to the relationship until those things have been really significantly addressed. I think that’s also a really, really important thing. You said, Rob, that there are Prodependence Anonymous groups. That’s very exciting using the twelve-step model but applying it to these concepts. Yes, but we would never use the word prodependency because it’s not a pathology. It’s not a name. It’s not a label. It’s a concept, which says the troubled people who love other troubled people, who are both on a journey of healing are better off together than they are separate. Codependency in my belief system broke up a lot of good marriages that could have been saved in the ‘90s, had people been redirected back to their relationships instead of simply asked to self-actualize for themselves. I deeply agree with that. Harville Hendrix’s work really turned my head around when he talked about there’s a certain point in a relationship where your partner cannot give you the thing you most need, but that’s not the point to end the relationship. That’s the beginning of doing the work of deeper love. This blew my mind when I heard it. I do remember in those Codependence Anonymous meetings. There was a thing. It would make me laugh that somebody would say, “I just broke up with my partner,” and people would clap. It was like a kind of general thing that people would do. For a lot of assumptions that were under there, “I just broke up with my partner who wasn’t treating me right, etc.,” but the fact that that kind of separation was the way to go instead of in it and through it, assuming the kind of qualities of integrity that we keep talking about as being so central. Let’s not forget, Ken, that not everyone has those qualities if they are an active addict. It doesn’t mean that they are not present. In other words, I might as a heroin addict spend my kids’ college fund to get some drugs, but sober, I might work 3 or 4 jobs and take no time for myself to pay that fund back. Many addicts have very intact moral and ethical belief systems. It’s just that they’re obliterated by the addiction. Yes. It’s so deeply true. Rob, anything you want to share in closing about codependency, about prodependence, about being in a relationship with an addict, about exploring whether or not you might have an addiction? Any closing thoughts you want to share? I want to say to you, Ken, that I love that you’re doing Deeper Dating. I love that you’re helping people find their true selves and be able to reveal them as fully as they can to the people they love because that is how intimacy is created. It’s the revealing of oneself to others and taking that risk. First, I have to say kudos to you for the work you’re doing. I think it’s much needed, especially with single people, because I hear them struggle. I hear, “What is the relationship? How do you find a relationship? What is intimacy? What is love?” We’ve all struggled, but especially in this digital era, I think it’s really a struggle. Kudos to you for doing it. Thank you. Kudos to you for bringing kindness, humanity, compassion, and clinical clarity to this entire concept of prodependence versus an approach to codependency which really can limit us and devalue us at the same time. Rob, thank you so much for all that. How can people get in touch with you and learn more about your work? I’m in lots of places. If you want to hear the podcast, as you said, it’s very, very popular. We’ve had Harville Hendrix and Sue Johnson and a whole bunch of really famous therapists on there, and that is Sex, Love, & Addiction. You can read my blog on Psychology Today, Sex and Love in the Digital Age, or you can drop me a note at our treatment program because I’m Rob@SeekingIntegrity.com. Our treatment program, which is for men with sex, intimacy, and drug disorders because sometimes they cross and they’re co-related, is SeekingIntegrity.com. Thank you again for having me. Thank you so much, Rob. It’s always a joy to speak with you. We will continue our conversations. Thank you, everybody, for listening to this episode, and we look forward to seeing you on the next one. Thanks.

 

Table of Contents

• My Story
• First Stage: Embroiled In Relationships
• Second Stage: We Begin To Claim The Beauty Of Our Hearts
• Third Stage: Attractions And Relationships Of Inspiration

How Deep Friendship Paves The Way To Deepest Love

Single People: Building Your Family Of Creation

How to build a family of creation in this world that supports you, nourishes you, gives you meaning, and helps you find the love that you’re seeking or deepen the love that you have already? Stay tuned to this episode of the Deeper Dating Podcast. — Hello and welcome to the Deeper Dating Podcast. I’m Ken Page and I’m a psychotherapist. I’m the author of Deeper Dating and the Cofounder of DeeperDating.com, a site where single people can meet in an online environment that’s inspiring, kind, fun, and respectful. Today in this show, I’m going to talk about building a family of creation for single people. This episode and every episode, I’m going to share the greatest tools that I know to help you find love and keep it flourishing and heal your life in the process because the skills of dating are nothing more than the skills of love, and the skills of love are the greatest skills of all for a happy, rich life. If you want to learn more about the deeper dating path to real intimacy, just go to DeeperDatingPodcast.com and you can sign up for my mailing list, get free gifts, learn about how to use these ideas to transform your own intimacy journey, and see transcripts of every episode. I also just want to say that everything I share in this podcast is educational in nature. It is not medical or psychiatric advice or treatment. If you’re experiencing any serious symptoms, please seek professional help. Finally, if you like what you’re learning here, I would love it if you could subscribe and leave me a review. Thank you so much for that and let’s dive in.   I would love to talk about, and this is for everyone, this is for people who are single, people who are coupled, but specifically, I want to talk about building a family of creation in the world for people who are single and looking for a relationship. This is a huge subject and one that I have a lot of personal relationship to, and as a psychotherapist, one that I work with people around all the time. This is important on so many levels because the deepest skills of intimacy that we’re going to use in our relationship, our romantic relationship, are learned through all of our social relationships. The big things of making a different kind of decision about who you’re going to choose to be with, about learning how to choose people who really feed your soul, attractions of inspiration in the friendship arena, and then getting through all of the roadblocks, obstacles, dilemmas and fears of closeness, and all the patterns that come up. We learn that by building love in our life. That helps us profoundly make better choices about who we’re going to end up committing to, and living in the relationship with the person that we commit to in a richer, deeper way. I just want to say something just a little bit about my stories. I could start way at the beginning, but where I’m going to start was arriving in New York City to go to graduate school and being a gay man, and discovering this buffet, this banquet of sex, the search for love, infinite varieties of playground type of ways to hook up and connect. In my eyes, all the time, looking for what I really wanted, which was a relationship, but you might not have known that from the things that I was doing on a regular basis because that’s what I was brought up in. This was like the gay men’s crazy life of the ‘80s. Anyway, I did this for a long time, and my goal was to find love. I devoted a lot of time to my profession. That was very exciting to me and I was passionate about that. I devoted most of the rest of my time to this beautiful world of this gay, pre-AIDS blossoming of queer culture, which was fun, sexual, magical, and empty in a lot of ways at the same time. Slow down, connect to your feelings, and discover yourself.CLICK TO TWEETI did this. I was passionate about it, passionate for years. I just didn’t want to even leave New York City on the weekends and I was driven. I was driven to find love, and I failed at finding love, but there was so much excitement that I kept doing this. At a certain point, I committed to a deeper path of healing and that involves therapy. That was also when I was getting trained as a therapist at the same time, and I went into therapy. One of the most amazing things that happened to me at that point was that I discovered, because I slowed down and connected to my feelings enough, I discovered that as filled as my life was, it was really empty. As much time as I was spending looking for love, I was spending no time building love, except maybe with the wrong people like the club people or whoever it was that I felt had what I wanted at that time. When I entered into deeper therapy work, workshops, groups, and this kind of deeper training, I discovered an emptiness that was so great. This is when the shift in my journey away from shame and away from emptiness began. I remember being in a workshop, and I was touching on a loneliness that was so huge that I didn’t let myself even feel it. I remember at one point, deep tears came out. If you ever saw a kid who got hurt, they were so upset and so shocked that their mouth was wide open, but no cry came out because the tears were too big at first to find traction. I remember feeling that way, and then I remember the tears just pouring and pouring out. This was a good thing. This was a huge healing. I was beginning to recognize that I had not built family in the world. I had not built community, and the beautiful people who I could have had that with didn’t interest me enough. This is just my story. It may not be your story, but maybe pieces of it relate to you and are useful, because that is when my deeper, richer journey began to change.

I began to think of the people who I adored and who felt safer to me, who I had not really spent much time with for years as I was in this search, looking for love and in this kind of crazy world that I was in. I began to reach out to those people. I realized how hungry I was for family, for people to just connect with, live with, be stupid with, have fun with and do nothing with. None of those were parts of my New York City life, so I began to reconnect with people who were very precious to me. I’m going to come back to this because this connects to, I think, one of the greatest ways that we can start building connection and family in our lives. As I did that, I started building connections in other ways. I had a wonderful support group of other therapists. It went on for twelve years, and it was infinitely nourishing to me. I decided that I was ready to have cats, which you might think is kind of crazy at 30 years old, but that was very big for me. That was another moment of revelation that I could take care of these pets for me at that point, because I had been stunted. It was a very huge, deep, and emotional thing. It was a milestone. I still remember it. I started a support group for chronically single therapists, and I realized how important connection and family was. All along this journey at the same time, I was looking for relationships. As I learned the lessons that I described, my friends changed. I began to choose what I call attractions of inspiration for my friends. I did not realize that that was the heart and soul of what was going to change my entire search for love. It happened with friends first, and then I started noticing that the guys that I was dating had more depth, had more decency, had deeper traction in goodness and authenticity that I was used to with the people that I was hanging out with. I realized how great a hunger I had for family. Reconnect with people who are very precious to you.CLICK TO TWEETAt one point along the way, this is something I’ve talked about a bunch, but I saw Almodóvar’s movie, All About My Mother, and I left the movie, and I was very shaken. It was about someone who found a path to meaning after great tragedy through building family in different ways in the world. That’s how I experienced it. I left the movie and I thought, “What’s going on inside me?” My next step in building a family without a partner was to become a dad, was to adopt a child as a single dad. This was something I dreaded so much for so many years because I thought that would be the ultimate stamp on my eternal singlehood if I did that. Most of my friends were not dads at that time. I felt like I was at this long table of people and they were all eating rubber chicken at a banquet, and I hit this gloppy, gooey, glorious chocolate dripping sundae that I was eating. That’s what it was like to be a dad for me. It brought me incredible joy and moved me into a state of family, which I had been so longing for. That led to meeting my husband and his children, and building a shared family together and meeting so much of those needs, but it didn’t happen the way that I thought it would happen. I thought I was going to find a boyfriend and that boyfriend would become a lover. We didn’t have husbands yet in those days but life partner, that was what I thought. I found that I had to dig my own well, and that well was building a beautiful family. Looking for the people who were deep with their authenticity, deep with their integrity, deep with their goodness who truly loved and appreciated me, and building a world with them.

That was anathema for me because I thought it meant moving away from the thing that mattered the most, which was finding a relationship, but God knows that was what moved me toward that. Many of you know this wisdom. I didn’t know it much at all, but if this is any help for those of you that maybe think that you really just need to find the partner and then family will come after that, that for most of us, the great lessons of love are learned in building a family of creation in the world, whether we have a partner or not. I just want to say another thing here with that veer, because your search, our search for a healthy, beautiful and inspiring family of creation, is an absolute mirror for finding your one, finding your beloved. It’s not different. Marianne Williamson said this so gorgeously, and I love this quote. She said, “As I grow emotionally and spiritually, my friends become more like lovers and my lovers become more like friends.” I would go as far as to say that the journey to build a family of creation is the very foundation that’s essential for everybody who is on an intimacy journey, whether they have a partner, whether they don’t have a partner, but definitely those who are single, this journey to create a rich family is where we learn our lessons. Many of you know this already, but I just want to share a couple other things. One is that in my decades of being a therapist and doing this work, and this is something I’ve talked about in another podcast, I see a three-stage process that encapsulates and captures the wiser intimacy journey. The first stage, we are embroiled in relationships with people that maybe irritate us or frustrate us, or don’t meet our needs, we try to get them to, it doesn’t work that well. Maybe they’re abusive. Maybe they take advantage of us, but they’re not the relationships where our hearts say, “This is family. This is home. This is good. This is safe. These are beings I respect and trust.” 'As I grow emotionally and spiritually, my friends become more like lovers, and my lovers become more like friends.' - Marianne WilliamsonCLICK TO TWEETThe great truth, I think, is that it’s only with those people that we find a real foundation and find real happiness. Those are the people we need. We have people we don’t have a choice. We need to be with them, their family, but in terms of family of creation, that’s it. Those are the choices we must make. Anything else is almost a waste. I don’t want to say that old relationships should just be junked, but they might need to be revamped, changed, healed, shifted or maybe let go of. Anyway, the first stage for many of us is to be embroiled in relationships like that, including romantic relationships, what I call the attractions of deprivation. The second stage, which I have been fortunate enough to witness huge numbers of time in doing the work that I do, and doing the teaching that I do. The second stage as we begin to claim the beauty of our hearts, our authenticity, and our real selves is that we begin to lose our taste for those people. Literally, we start losing our taste for them. It’s not as exciting, entrancing, sticky, itchy or endlessly engaging to try to pull those people along or get them to be different, or try to be more like them because we think we’re just too sensitive. We lose our taste for that, and then there’s this weird second stage often, which is pretty empty. It’s like nothing is going on, but something is going on. The deeper shift is happening underneath. The seedlings under the earth are just beginning to move, because this is a vast shift when we lose our taste for attractions of deprivation. Stage two is marked by a weird kind of emptiness like, “Where are my people?”

Ramakrishna, the great Saint Ramakrishna who was given his temple that later became a great center of spiritual development in India, he used to do this thing. He would go up onto the steps and he would actually call out, “My own, come to me.” That was a practice he did because he knew that his life was empty of his people, and then his people began to come. That middle stage is an odd one, but it passes, and people who feed our souls start coming into our life when that becomes our intention. That is a fabulous, amazing thing. The same stages happen in our search for love, and so then as the second stage moves into the third stage, and the third stage is having a life that’s filled with attractions and relationships of inspiration. What happens is, and it’s almost unnoticeable, as a therapist and a coach, I really usually have to help people begin to notice that their field is really shifting at this point, that these new relationships come up. All of a sudden, you’re meeting friends who don’t disturb you in those same ways or shake you up, but instead feed you and nurture you. You begin to notice that there are people who speak truth like you speak truth, or care about goodness like you care about goodness, or care about integrity like you care about integrity, or whatever the things are for you that you feel that wonderful feeling of these people are my spiritual home in the world. You notice it in little ways like you’re in class and there’s someone next to you, and they’re just really nice. They’re interested in maybe hanging out. You don’t even notice that as a thing, but I’m encouraging you to notice that as a thing, because as you do this journey that begins to happen, and then that happens more and more, and your life, little by little, becomes more populated with these beautiful people. Is this quick? Is it easy? No. Is it slow? Is it frustrating? Often, but it is beautiful and foundational and precious. The more it happens, the more your life becomes populated with these new relationships and then you are in stage three. Going through these stages with your friends moves you into going through the exact same stages if you do it consciously in your relationship. Sometimes that’s harder because when you’re talking about sex and romance, it’s easier to get sticky with those old paradigms. Those are the three stages. The next thing I want to say is I want to talk about how can you speed that process up? What is the quickest, smartest way to begin to fill your life with family of creation? What I have found to be true if you really want to speed this up is don’t start from scratch. Look at your contacts over the last number of years, and see who has a quality of goodness, a rock-solid quality of goodness combined with integrity. Who interests you by the way that they choose to live their lives? Who has an essential generosity of spirit? Every one of those people are gold. They’re your tribe, maybe not perfectly or exactly, but essentially and in really big ways. Those are the places to go back. I know that for me, I gave those relationships short shrift for a long time when I was on my crazy search for just a relationship. Start with those people because you probably have them in your life already, and build the connection and build the sense of family. Another thing that’s wonderful that I talk about all the time is to have a learning partner. If there’s someone who’s single, who’s willing to do the deeper work, who has all the qualities I just described and is willing to do the richer, deeper work of intimacy, become learning partners with them. Meet once a week in person on Zoom. Laugh, bitch, complain, but share your growth and support each other in your growth. It’s this act of bringing family to our worlds that makes our world so much more meaningful. This is such a rich journey and I’d love to hear from people what your experience is with this. You could just go to DeeperDatingPodcast.com and press Ask Ken. I’d love to hear your stories too. For all of you, the great treasure in looking for love and looking for a family is to choose and find those people who feel like home, and have those qualities of character, goodness and decency, and to build your home there. Good luck in your journey. Thanks for reading. I look forward to connecting with you on the next episode.

There are three powerful ways to speed your path to love—right now! Each of these things changes your future in love, helps you grow into a fuller expression of the person you are meant to be, and deepens your capacity for true intimacy. Try them right now and watch what happens! —

Table of Contents

• Look For Events And Communities Of People With The Same Values
• Finding A Learning Partner
• Admit You Are Pushing Love Away

3 Powerful Ways To Speed Your Path To Love—Right Now!

Life-Changing Hacks That Lead To Romantic Love And Personal Healing

There are three things that you can do right now that will accelerate, empower, and deepen your entire search for love. Stay tuned to this episode of the Deeper Dating Podcast to learn what they are. — Hello everybody and welcome to the Deeper Dating Podcast. I’m Ken Page and I’m a psychotherapist. I’m the author of the book, Deeper Dating, and I’m the Cofounder of DeeperDating.com, a site where single people can meet in an online environment that’s fun, inspiring, kind, and respectful. Today, I’m going to talk about three things that you can do that will immediately empower, accelerate, and deepen your search for love. In this podcast, I’m going to share with you the greatest tools that I know to help you find love and keep it flourishing, and heal your life in the process because the skills of dating are nothing more than the skills of love, which are the greatest skills of all for a happy life.

If you want to learn more about the deeper dating path to real intimacy, just go to DeeperDatingPodcast.com. If you sign up for my mailing list, you’ll get free gifts, you’ll be able to get transcripts of every episode, and get to hear all 102 episodes. I also just want to say that everything I share in this podcast is educational in nature. It’s not medical or psychiatric advice or treatment. Please seek help if you feel you need it. By the way, if you like what you’re learning here, it would be a wonderful thank you if you subscribe at iTunes or elsewhere and left your review. Thank you so much for that. Let’s jump in. The first thing that you can do, and these are the things that I would love and encourage you to make actionable, because really finding love is such a difficult, mysterious, and complicated thing. Wherever there are the gems of real tools that work, it’s just such a healing and empowering feeling to feel like you know those tools and you can use them. I’m going to give you three broad tools. If you can take one of them and make it yours even today, it will be a really good thing. We are so misguided with advice about how to find love as if the wisdom doesn’t come from our guts, as we say in Jewish, our kishkes, our deep insides. As if the wisdom doesn’t come from there, as if it comes from somewhere outside, as if we need this “it” to be able to be sexy, attractive, and desirable. Some kind of “it” that we have to figure out what it is, as opposed to living the magic of who we are.

Look For Events And Communities Of People With The Same Values

These different tools that I’m going to give you will help you live the magic of who you are, of what your gifts are. It will help you mature and develop those gifts and learn to become more of an artisan in your search for love and your intimacy journey as a whole. They’re all a little bit uphill. They take some work, they take some practice, but the first one is one that I have resisted a lot in my life, and then breaking through that resistance is what led to my marriage and a lot of growth. It was the absolute essence of what transformed a pretty painful and rough period of decades of deeply looking for love and never finding it. This was something that really transformed it, and here’s what it was. I stopped looking for love in my old ways, which in those days as a gay man in New York City, involved the clubs, the parties, and all of those kinds of things. It’s not that I didn’t adore dancing and continue dancing even when I changed these patterns because I did, but changing these patterns changed my world and changed my life. The skills of dating are nothing more than the skills of love.CLICK TO TWEETIt was saying that I’m not just going to look for people in those ways, which now is just somewhat kind of mindless, habitual, or non-soulful approach to finding love online, which I think is the common way that people do that now. Instead, saying that you are going to think about what your deepest passions, interests, and values are, and that you are going to go to, at this point, online environments  When you can go to non-online environments, fantastic, but there’s so much online too, with people who deeply share the values and passions that matter the most to you.

  I have been a therapist for a really long time, working with people who are single and looking for relationships. I would say this is, in many ways, the single most powerful tool. I have story after story in my head of people finally doing this, finally going to the events, joining the communities with people who share their deepest values. Maybe they didn’t find their partner there, but they met someone who introduced them to their partner, or they met someone who introduced them to another event that really fed their passions, and they met their partner there. I can’t tell you how many stories of that I’ve heard, because when we’re in environments like that, we begin to glow. We begin to show who we really are. It’s easier and more comfortable to do that with people who share the things that matter the most to you. When you do that, you become more beautiful. You become more alive. You are more noticed by people who are looking for someone like you. It's a humbling thing to admit the ways you are pushing love away, even as you're seeking it.CLICK TO TWEETIt’s not going to be the first time that you go to an event like that, that you meet your soulmate probably, or the second or the third, but I pretty much promise you that you will dramatically speed your path to finding your one when you do this. It’s not that there’s not other work to do and other patterns that need to be changed, etc., but this is the place to start if you want a really big bang for your buck. You could even do that. I encourage you to take one of these things on right now, if you can, or at some point today. Look online for events and communities with people who care about the same things you care about, and join and connect. Look for events and communities, particularly with a good number of people of the gender or genders that you’re interested in.

  There are also niche dating sites that you can find that have a lot smaller numbers of people, but at the same time, they also have people who share the things that really matter to you. In fact, on DeeperDating.com, we’re very clear of offering ways that people can search for people who share their values, interests, and passions. Something I really believe in if you get out there and do that, it will enrich you and it will also speed your path. What I would love is for a bunch of people listening now to try that, and to then go to DeeperDatingPodcast.com under the Ask Ken section. Leave me a message telling me about what your experience was and what it was like, so I can begin to share these experiences with other people. It is different to do that. It is wiser and smarter dating.

Finding A Learning Partner

Next, find a learning partner. Literally, these three tools will change your future. They truly will so much more than a lot of the habitual patterns that probably, if you’re anything like I was, and like so many of us are, you’ve tried again and again but haven’t necessarily worked. Find a learning partner. How do you find a learning partner? You go through your list of connections. You look for someone preferably single, but they don’t have to be single, because you can support them in whatever area they want to grow in. It’s nice if it’s two single people doing that. There’s something really good about that. Someone who has integrity. Someone who doesn’t hurt you, who cares about you, who has your best interest at heart. Someone who has good character and someone who is willing to grow, change, and work toward their goal. Someone with a rich sense of insight. Those people are A-team. They are our gold. There is almost no greater meat and potatoes intimacy skill than seeing the ways we're not available for love and then changing it.CLICK TO TWEETIf you find somebody like that, and you commit to just connecting together for half an hour a week, making plans and bringing mindfulness and awareness to your search for love, you can use a template of learning. Any teacher that you want, including my work, the Deeper Dating work, but any template you want. The two of you could use that together and you could go through it. Every week you could touch base to bring more power, bravery, depth, habit-breaking, risk-taking, vulnerability, and commitment to love, to your journey. I pretty much promise you, you will shave off vast amounts of time in your search for healthy love if you do this. The research backs this up 1,000%. We need a community or a person with whom we can learn, have insights, practice those insights, and do all of the failing, rewiring, bitching, complaining, sharing, longing, yearning, complaining some more. All the things that we do with people that we feel safe with when we’re on a journey with them, that you will get to do that with them. There will be so many points where you bring something up, and they’re just going to say something, and it’s going to touch you. It’s going to open a door and it’s going to spark a kind of ambition to growth and healing. That is beautiful. We learn from jumping from stone to stone, from rock to rock. Sometimes I think of the wiser dating journey as being like the Parkour. There you are, and there’s a ledge in front of you. There’s a space you can’t get through, so you look at what’s the next ledge that you could somehow get to, which for you, for me, for us is the next point of insight, the next point of understanding, the next point of commitment. Those insights are our fuel. We leap from where we are into that insight and it brings us to the next ledge, to the next rock, to the next point. We wait for insight and we get insight from our learning partner. We get insight from our practices, from our growth, and when we get that, we just make a leap. How does this Parkour person get from one point to another that looks just completely crazy? They do it by looking at the next point that they can leap to.

  For us, it’s our next insight. When you do this work in a more conscious way, you will have insights. You’ll say, “I’ve been pushing this really nice person away without even realizing it,” or “There’s a person I’m interested in and I am just totally too afraid to let them know. I hang out with them on a regular basis, but I don’t truly tell them,” or whatever it is. Those are the points that we need to leap to when we get those insights. You will get them with your learning partner. You will make a commitment to take that leap, and then you will meet with your learning partner, and report on how you did. It makes all the difference in the world, not to mention, it’s free and it’s fun. That’s point number two. If you weren’t going to do point number one or even if you were, if you can go through your list of contacts, find someone, ask them and concretize this, your year will be different. Your search for love will be different, and hence, your future will be different. These are real things.

Admit You Are Pushing Love Away

The third is a little bit harder. It takes a lot of courage. It is incredibly powerful. You get a huge bang for your buck with this one. You truly do. You change your field. You change your future. That is to admit. It’s a humbling thing to admit the ways that you are pushing love away even as you’re seeking it. Maybe you keep choosing people that you know in your guts aren’t going to be right for you or aren’t going to be good for you. Maybe you keep choosing people that you’re not deeply passionate about because they’re safer. Maybe you find that you’re drinking too much or smoking too much. Maybe it’s internet porn. Maybe you meet wonderful people, and then you kind of feel the need to flee. These are humbling things to face, but let me tell you, if you can, with the help of your learning partner or on your own, but hopefully with the help of your learning partner or therapist or coach, if you can find the ways that you are pushing love away consciously, unconsciously, semi-consciously, and you can admit those things to yourself, it’s very humbling, but it is very life changing. If you can make a plan to change that, and then please get the support you need because we do not change patterns just by willpower almost ever. That’s usually a myth. We do it and the research backs this up. I think 10% of people who want to change a really deeply entrenched pattern succeed unless they have a template for a process that they believe in, and they have a community of support where they can fail, pick themselves up, rewire and get support and care again and again. That’s who succeeds. If you can admit this humbling truth that almost against your own will, you are avoiding love, turning from it, pushing it away, not making yourself present for it. If you can do that, I believe that’s heroic, truly heroic. What I can almost completely promise you, but it’s something that I have found to be true again and again, when you address that, when you change that, there will be ways that your world will open. The people you meet will be different. The way you interact with them will be different, and your luck will shift. There’s almost nothing that you’re going to get a bigger bang for your buck around in your search for love than admitting the places where your fear of intimacy holds you back, and full-heartedly with support, addressing those things. It changes your luck. It changes your field. This may take some searching to find a path that you really believe in, teachings that you believe in, support that feels safe and that you really believe in. This is something I’ve found to be really true in my own life. There is almost no greater meat and potatoes intimacy skill than seeing the ways that we’re not available for love, and admitting it and longing to change, and then practicing changing. That is one of the most central intimacy skills that exist, not to be beyond our fear of intimacy, but to begin to learn its language, to work with it, and to create transformation. Thank you for listening. Before we end this episode, I want to encourage you to just take a minute. I encourage you not to get through and pass this episode without doing this. Consider picking one of these. Allow yourself to become a kind of growth athlete in your search for love. It’s a joyful, empowering, wonderful experience. It’s like that great experience when you exercise, and all of a sudden, you notice that you have more strength, more resilience, more muscle, more bounce. It’s just the best feeling. The same is true in our search for love when we start to really bring wisdom to it. There’s a joy that happens when we know that we’re really making change around something that matters so much. I deeply encourage each one of you to try at least one of these things. Just take it on. Take on all three if you really are ready to go for it and watch what happens. Thank you so much for listening. Go to DeeperDatingPodcast.com or DeeperDating.com. I look forward to seeing you on the next episode.

In this Deeper Dating Q&A episode, listeners bring their most important questions about love, sex, dating, and relationships to host Ken Page and get his direct personal advice. Today, we’ll explore how to recognize your Core Gifts, how to understand and recognize marijuana overuse in a partner, how to understand your attraction patterns, ….and more! —

Table of Contents

• Attraction Patterns
• Understanding And Recognizing Marijuana Use In A Partner
• The Wave
• Your Core Gifts

Deeper Dating Q&A: Expert Advice For All Your Questions About Love, Dating And Sex

Welcome to the Deeper Dating Q&A, where I answer your most pressing questions about love, sex, and intimacy. The goal is that you’ll leave this episode with new possibilities and hopefully, new revelations about your own love life, so stay tuned to the Deeper Dating Podcast. — Welcome to the Deeper Dating Podcast. I’m Ken Page and I’m a psychotherapist, author of the book Deeper Dating and Cofounder of DeeperDating.com, a new online dating experience where single people can meet online in a way that’s kind, inspiring, and respectful. Every episode, I’m going to share the greatest tools I know to help you find love, keep it flourishing, and heal your life in the process, because the true skills of dating are nothing more than the true skills of intimacy. If you want to learn more about the deeper dating path to real intimacy, just go to DeeperDatingPodcast.com and you can sign up for my mailing list, get free gifts, and get transcripts to every single one of my episodes. Also, everything I share in this podcast is educational in nature. It’s not medical, psychiatric advice, or treatment. If you’re experiencing any serious psychological conditions, please seek professional help. Finally, if you like what you’re learning here, it would be wonderful if you could subscribe and leave me a review. Thank you so much for that, and let’s jump in. What goes up has to come down. After the high, there is a low.CLICK TO TWEET

Attraction Patterns

The first question is from Laura, and she has two questions. Number one is the idea of attractions of inspiration and attractions of deprivation. Is that a spectrum or is that very black and white? For those new listeners, I’m just going to say a little bit really quickly about what attractions of inspiration and deprivation are. Episode 10 explains these two different kinds of attractions in much greater detail, but an attraction of deprivation is when we get attracted to somebody because their love and their availability seems so close, but it’s not there. We think we need to change ourselves and fix ourselves, or change and fix them to finally get it right, and we get lost in those relationships often for a really long time, and they’re very seductive. An attraction of inspiration is when you’re attracted to someone because of their integrity, their goodness, their growing availability, and their decency. It’s a very different circuitry of attraction. One leads to pain and one leads to the real potential for happiness, so absolutely it’s a spectrum. There is nobody who is a perfect attraction of inspiration. There’s nobody, well, I don’t know about nobody, but probably really close to nobody, who is a pure attraction of deprivation. There can be extremes in either of those cases, but you want to look for one where in your heart you can say, “This is deeply, truly, and essentially an attraction of inspiration.” The other part of the question is, can one partner in a partnership be attracted out of inspiration and the other person be attracted out of deprivation? That’s a really interesting question and definitely, that is a possibility. One partner can be deeply inspired by the other partner, and that other partner could feel like, “This person is really just not able to meet my needs,” so yes, absolutely.

 

Understanding And Recognizing Marijuana Use In A Partner

Next question, “Hi, Ken, I love your show and your book, and I’m a big fan. I am starting in a new relationship after having been single for most of the past five years. We’re almost two months in, and this guy is really great. He’s everything on my man list and more. He’s fun. He’s sweet. He’s got a successful career. He successfully raised a son. He has multiple degrees. He’s very thoughtful and romantic. He’s a wonderful lover and he’s supportive of me. He follows through in his words. He’s responsible with money, and he has plans for the future that even include me now. He’s asked me if I want to be included. All of that sounds so fabulous. The only issue I have is that he smokes marijuana on a regular basis after work or when he’s done with his responsibilities. I don’t have a problem with recreational marijuana use, but it concerns me when it’s almost every day. He doesn’t drink too much. I’m afraid to tell my friends about this because I don’t want them to tell me that I shouldn’t be with him because he is so great. I would love your feedback.” My first thought is this guy sounds great and there’s such good here, and I just want to really acknowledge that. What I would say simply is conversation is needed. One of the signs of an addiction is that you use a substance to get away from or to control or to medicate certain symptoms. That’s a real question. If he needs to smoke every day, what is he doing it for? Is it to calm down? Is it to get more relaxed? Is it to listen to music? What are his reasons for doing it? Because there are issues that he is medicating by doing that, and that’s an important thing. That’s an important thing to be aware of. Our Core Gifts are the qualities in us that are the most tender, sensitive, and passionate. They are the deepest inner petals of our being.CLICK TO TWEETThe other thing is that research shows really simply, what goes up has to come down. The main psychoactive ingredient in cannabis is THC, which activates cannabinoid receptors that are found in the brain. Those receptors are really important and they allow us to experience novel sensations. They relax us. They give us a zing in terms of our experiencing of life. All these things happen, but the reverse happens as well. The receptors in our brain, which can allow us to experience these novel sensations, this relaxation, this richer experience of life actually diminish when we smoke weed too regularly. People who use marijuana regularly have 20% fewer of those receptors in their brain’s cortex, and it takes a month of total abstinence to be able to upregulate to the normal levels. In other words, after the high, there is a low, and here are some of the symptoms of that low. After your high, there’s a restlessness and a fidgety feeling, and often it’s worse when you’re trying to go to sleep. There’s anxiety, irritability, loss of appetite, boredom, which is the opposite of novelty, which marijuana helps you enjoy in an even more intense way, and insomnia. All of those things can come with different parts of life, and it takes a rigorous degree of honesty to say, “Do I feel like I smoke or I get high because I want more of the opposite of those negative things?” Because when you’re used to smoking weed every day, you experience these negative symptoms and then you use the weed to try to get over them. There’s a cycle that happens there and it takes, as I said, a month of abstinence to actually notice if there are shifts and changes. You are changing your brain, and so many people talk about a kind of quality of irritability or boredom. There is certainly research proven – less ability to enjoy and delight in novel experiences in life, with the diminishment of those receptors.

  There’s something called Amotivational Syndrome, which is that you lack the motivation to take part in activities. There’s a diminishment of motivation. Short-term memory loss happens. Some distorted sensory perception happens, and over time there could be personality changes as well. These are things to be concerned about, and I think things to think about, research a little bit, and share in conversation in an ongoing way about your concerns. Hopefully, he will be willing to listen, reconsider, and explore further. Good luck with this because he sounds like an amazing guy, and this is an issue that will need exploration and discussion.

The Wave

Next, “Hello, Ken, I have a question about the wave,” and the wave is what I think of as the single biggest saboteur of healthy new love. I talk about it in a lot of detail in Episode 39, but I know it destroyed my capacity to find love for decades. It’s when someone is really available, decent, and present, and all of a sudden, you just want to flee. You feel claustrophobic. Your interest plummets. You feel judgmental of that person. In my experience, more than half the people at events that where I’m teaching experience the wave. The journey to accept, name, and treasure our Core Gifts is the journey that changes everything in our dating life.CLICK TO TWEET“My recently ex-boyfriend and I are in our late 50s so we’ve been dating for three years. The first year we spent in the same state, the last two we’ve been traveling back and forth between nearby states, and I was set to move to his state. I had a wonderful job opportunity, and we had discussed closing the distance gap for a while. This seemed like the chance to do it, but the bottom fell out of my heart when he balked. There was no sincerity in his voice. I asked if he still saw a future for us, because he’d been acting kind of distant for the past few months, which I attributed to the wave. A week after my job interview, I was back in my state and he sent me a breakup email. He wanted to remain friends but in the last few months, he’s actually become surly and angry even at his dog. His sister says he’s been dating randomly, even during COVID. This is not the man I’ve known for three years. I’m concerned for him, but I just want to know if this is wave behavior or perhaps this is his true personality.” Here’s what I’d like to say about that. This does not seem like just the wave. The wave is a wave. It is not sustained. There’s a quality of anger and disconnection that is indicative of a real problem here. I don’t know if it’s an addiction problem of some sort that would often manifest in this kind of a way, or if you’re seeing qualities in his personality that apart from addiction are really part of his characteralogical structure. I would say this doesn’t seem like the wave. It’s too sustained. It’s too angry. It’s too unpleasant. This is for some reason him. I think the chances are significant that there’s some kind of trauma or some kind of addiction, because it’s different than he’s ever been before. It makes me want to ask listeners, have you ever had an experience like that where someone seemed like one person, and then they shifted so significantly, and that shift remained sustained or kept coming back again and again?

  What was that? Might that have been addiction in retrospect? Might that have been a mental illness? Might that have been the effects of serious trauma? It’s very important for us to know, but what I would say here is just like they say in the 12 Step Program. Remember the three Cs. You did not cause this. You cannot control this and you cannot cure it. There’s a real problem here that he’s going through. It is a good thing that you are not with him because these are real problems that it doesn’t seem like he’s addressing. As painful and as hard as that is, I celebrate the good parts of what you’ve had but it does seem like it’s really time to move on.

Your Core Gifts

Here’s a question from Lisa in the Netherlands. “Dear, Mr. Page. I bought your book I think a year ago, and I want to say thank you because I think it’s the first time in my life that I really have hoped to find someone who can actually love me for who I am. I have a question because it’s hard for me to find out what my Core Gifts are, and the problem is that I see again and again, when I go to that place of myself and my gifts, I get stuck. I grew up in a family where I was rejected for almost everything. I was too sensitive. I was too smart. I was too honest. I was too fierce. I was too shy. I was too strong. Nothing was okay, so I’ve done a lot of things to really start embracing and accepting myself, but when you say, ‘What’s your Core Gift?’ I just don’t know, so how can you find out what your Core Gift is when there’s so much rejection in your life in so many aspects?” This is a wonderful question. What I would say to you first, Lisa, is that you just named your Core Gifts in what you said. Now this concept, folks, of Core Gift is a really rich, deep, and important one. It’s something I speak about a lot in my book and in an ongoing way in this podcast. Our Core Gifts are the qualities in us, which are the most tender, sensitive, passionate. They are the deepest inner petals of our being, and often we have shame around them. We’re embarrassed around them. Their uniqueness scares us or embarrasses us. We’ve been shamed or hurt around them. The degree to which we don’t accept these attributes of ourselves is the degree to which we’re going to be sexually and romantically attracted to people who aren’t good for us. The journey to accept and name and treasure these Core Gifts is the journey that changes everything in our dating life, and when we learn to not just accept these qualities but cherish them, our attractions change, our love life changes, and our life changes in powerful ways, which is why this Deeper Dating journey is one of the richest journeys that a human being can experience in their life. What I would say to you, Lisa, is that the depth and richness of your being, frightened or, intimidated your family. I would say that you listed all your Core Gifts. You are deeply sensitive. You are smart. You’re really honest. You’re fierce. You’re also shy. You’re powerful but you’re also tender. You named all the qualities, and here’s something I want to say about this. In my work with people, in my intensives, in my courses, in everything around Core Gifts, once this concept becomes clear, what are the places where you are touched most deeply by life in pain or in joy and meaning? Those speak to your Core Gifts. There is in the book, and actually if you go to DeeperDating.com and you subscribe to my mailing list, you’ll get the first two chapters of the book in which I teach you all of the ways to discover and identify your Core Gifts. When you discover them, when people acknowledge and see, using these methods, their Core Gift, you just did that, Lisa, by saying, “What were the things I have been rejected for in my life?” The hardest part is to actually say, “Yup, those are Core Gifts. I am going to accept that these are treasures, that there is genius here, that there is power here, that these really are mine.” That’s harder than actually even finding and naming these qualities, and Lisa, that’s what I would say. You named them and you listed them, and each one is to be treasured. That’s the task, is the growing ability to treasure, honor, and listen to those parts of you. Trauma surgically bonds terrible feelings to precious parts of our being. We need to separate that bond by learning to love those parts of ourselves. The first step is naming them. The next step is learning to treasure them, and understand the gifts that they give us. Along with that is this incredibly important step of finding our tribe, the people who love these qualities about us. All of those pieces are necessary and yes, it’s a hard journey, especially if there’s been trauma, but that’s the journey you are on, Lisa. Thank you for that question. I will be answering more questions in the next Q&A episode of the Deeper Dating Podcast. I thank everybody for joining me. I will see you in the next episode, and if you go to DeeperDatingPodcast.com, join my mailing list, you’ll get lots more information about resources around this entire deeper journey to love. Thank you so much.

It’s the 100th episode! And there’s no way around it; dating can feel like an unhappy repetition of the same disappointing, time-consuming and frustrating old experiences. Here are some wonderful techniques to bring you back to inspiration, courage and a wonderful sense of new direction – and perhaps even fun. In this episode, you’ll find the hope it sometimes feels like you’ve lost.

Table of Contents

• The Slow Part Of The Journey
• Beautiful Forks In The Road
• Becoming Your Inner Mentor

  Today on the 100th episode of the Deeper Dating Podcast, I talk about all the difficult crossroads we hit on our dating journeys, and what to do to bring wisdom, guidance, and inspiration to those difficult moments. Stay tuned to the Deeper Dating Podcast. — Hello, everybody and welcome to the 100th episode of the Deeper Dating Podcast. I’m Ken Page and I’m a psychotherapist. I’m the author of Deeper Dating and I’m the Cofounder of DeeperDating.com, which is a way for people to meet online in an environment that’s respectful, warm, and inspiring. Today in this podcast, I’m going to talk about that difficult period on the dating journey when we’ve learned new skills and gained new wisdom, but we haven’t found our partner yet. This week and in every episode, I’m going to share the greatest tools that I know to help you find love and keep it flourishing, and heal your life in the process, because the skills of dating are the skills of love. The skills of love are the greatest skills of all for a happy life. If you want to learn more about the Deeper Dating path to real intimacy, just go to DeeperDatingPodcast.com. You’ll get free gifts and you’ll be able to see transcripts of every one of the 100 episodes, and I hope you enjoy that. Also, everything I share in this podcast is educational in nature. It’s not medical or psychiatric advice or treatment. If you’re concerned about certain symptoms or conditions that you’re experiencing, please do seek professional help. If you like what you’re learning here, I’d love it if you could subscribe and leave me a review. Thank you so much for that, and let’s jump in. In the work that I teach in my courses, in my intensives, in my book, and in my life journey, something that just really hits me, I mean, of course what hits me, and this is something I say a lot, which is there is hardly a day that ever goes by that I am not humbled by my clay feet when it comes to intimacy. I’m not happy about the things that I see that I need to work on, but I am happy because I see them and I work on them, because they hurt me, because they cause me pain, and I know that there are things that I need to work on. I’m just kind of in a very ongoing way in my relationships, pretty committed to that, but really, every step of the intimacy journey shows us our clay feet. Every step of the intimacy journey brings up new questions. We’re constantly, and we should be constantly, pondering with a kind of awe of what our stuck places are. How the same patterns seem to happen again and again. How hard it may be to extricate ourselves from that, as well as all the other wonderful things about the love that we have and the connections that we have. I think that we do a disservice on social media and elsewhere, where we celebrate how fabulous our relationship is and how fabulous our life is because we want to be teachers of how fabulous we’ve gotten, and how other people can learn from us, and get that fabulous too. That saddens me a lot because I think it’s those humbling moments that are the sacred ones. That’s where we build. That’s where we grow. In the dating journey, I spend a lot of time in my classes, teaching people what I think are the foundations of wiser dating. I say this all the time, what I teach these four stages of discovering, naming, and treasuring your CORE GIFTS, understanding in a deeper way your patterns of attraction, and what they can teach you, and need to teach you about the places where you don’t love yourself, and the places where you do love yourself, about your bravery in life, and actually being who you are and choosing people who treasure that. That’s all stage two.

  Stage three is the bravery of getting out there in new and different ways, and having growth adventures in an ongoing basis in our dating lives, hopefully with help, hopefully with support. The fourth stage is the rewiring that has to happen as we enter, because when we do these steps, we lose our taste for relationships that chip away our sense of self-worth. All of a sudden, we are having relationships with people who are kinder, more available, less roller-coastery, more caring, and more interested. This happens gradually, but it happens, and then there is a whole rewiring when our attraction is not based on fear of abandonment but instead, fear of intimacy because we’re with someone who’s really present. There’s so much rewiring ongoing that needs to happen that’s rich and important, and it’s an everyday kind of thing. These are the stages of the journey.

The Slow Part Of The Journey

I think that when I teach people about CORE GIFTS, it’s so powerful and so liberating for people to understand that, especially when we do the deep intensive work. It’s such a liberating, wonderful thing that there’s just a great sense of hope, and then people see that they are beginning to meet different kinds of people, that maybe their field or their understanding of themselves is actually beginning to shift. That is also fabulous, wonderful, empowering and exciting. Then there’s kind of like what happens between then and when you find your partner. That can be slow-going and hard. There can be repetitions of so many sadnesses and so many lonelinesses. That’s a hard part of the journey in very unique ways. Every part of the journey is humbling. It’s both humbling and thrilling, good, and wonderful when we heal and when we grow. We discover new mastery, but it’s all humbling too. This stage where we’re looking, and it hasn’t happened yet, and it could feel like that’s going on for way too long, can be a really difficult stage. I remember a dream I had once when I was fiercely, deeply into my intimacy journey, my desire to change the way that I date. I hope that for all of you, you are reaching a point where you can say, “I am deeply into my intimacy journey. I am learning, I am working on this, I’m really trying, I’m learning things, I’m changing.” If you can say that, there’s just such hope in that, but I remember very much being in that place of learning and growing, and very much still being single. I remember a dream I had. There was a couple that fell deeply, deeply in love. I was watching this in my dream, and they were kissing each other, and they were so deeply in love. I somehow ended up having this beautiful, dewy rose in my hand. This beautiful rose with dew on it, it was my rose. Every step of the intimacy journey shows us our clay feet.CLICK TO TWEETThey were so in love and I handed them the rose, and they really appreciated it, then they were out of the dream. I was filled with bittersweetness and I just wept. I was glad that I gave them that rose, but I was just viscerally experiencing my loneliness. For me, that period where I finally let myself stop rushing and could feel my loneliness, I knew that was a sign of progress. That dream I knew was a harbinger of something new. I could feel, even though it hurt, that I was on my way. What I would want for all of you that are on this journey is that you feel like, “It’s not going as perfectly as I wanted. I’m not there yet, but I’m on my way. I’m growing and I feel progress. I’m learning lessons of authenticity, truth, kindness and revealing, and making better choices,” because that’s such a huge one, is the choices we make. I say this a lot. We focus all the time on how attractive we are, and so not enough on our patterns of attraction. I’ve never done an episode like this before, where I just riff on the things that I think are important. I’m always a lot more prepared. You may have a different experience with this. I hope it’s a useful experience because the subject of what it’s like in the middle is such a big deal. Here’s maybe the greatest thing that I want to tell you, is don’t do it alone. Don’t do it alone. I used to love watching Sex and the City. I mean, these women were hitting up against their own brick walls again and again and again, but they at least got to have fun with each other and laugh and talk. I know for me, I needed friends who could guide me. I’ve mentioned this before. I created a support group for chronically single psychotherapists. It was only a few of us, but these were very wonderful people. Each week, we would come in with our struggles, what was happening in our dating life, where we were getting stuck, you know that experience of again and again, “Damn, I am hitting up against the same walls. I feel inept and I feel stuck, and I feel inadequate. What do I do?” Each of us would speak and the other members would hold what we said with care, and with what I call “cupped hands”. In that being held, my friends would notice openings that I didn’t see, like when you have a giant knot and you don’t know what to do with it, but there’s one thread that you could pull at and create an opening. They would notice these openings and they would share them with me. I still remember how pivotal that was, and how that changed my journey and other people’s journeys too. Many people in that group are now married and in couples. It’s just too hard a journey to do alone, and it’s not a smart journey to do alone because we will, even with help, again and again and again, play out old patterns. There’s pretty much no class that I teach where I don’t encourage people to have a learning partner, in my audio course, in my book, in my intensive. In fact, even on DeeperDating.com, when people fill out their profiles, I ask if they are interested in finding a learning partner, and there’s actually a special functionality where you can click to look for learning partners from anywhere who can pair with you, to take this journey with you and learn together, and grow together. I just can’t say how much I believe in the importance of that. Also, it could be a lonely journey, and this helps. It helps a lot. It’s kind of crazy actually to think that we can do this by ourselves, and so much of the education and the advice out there tells us, “Just change this, just change this, just change this,” but change is not easy. This is such a truth that we forget again and again.

 

Beautiful Forks In The Road

Every day, I wake up thinking I am going to get so much done. Every day at the end of the day, I think, “Oh my God, I got so much less done than my most conservative picture of what I could get done could even show.” I got done less than that. I’m 64 years old. I do this every single day. Change is not an easy thing. Rewiring is just not an easy thing. That’s something else I just want to talk about. I want to talk about the beauty of bewildering crossroads. How many times have you been in a situation in your dating life or your life-life where you’re like, “Damn, I am here again at this stuck place where I’ve done the same thing again,” or where, “I feel not seen, not heard, disappointed or betrayed, again. It’s happening again and I’m helpless because I don’t know how to stop this?” A bewildering point where you just don’t know how to behave or how to handle something, or you’re frustrated, resentful or angry. These are the intimacy crossroads that we experience, and they’re holy and powerful. Left to our own devices, whatever it is that our kind of inner kid told us is the best way to do this, push through, ignore other people’s needs. Only focus on other people’s needs and ignore our needs. The tendency, the fierce, fierce wired tendency is to do the same things. When we’re connected with someone or when we’re connected with our own inner wisdom, and I’m going to lead you in a beautiful process for your crossroads in just a couple of minutes, but whenever we’re in that situation, it’s a place to deconstruct as opposed to push through in our old ways. I think that’s an act of intimacy greatness when at those crossroads where we’re triggered, stuck, bewildered, pissed off, hurt, irritated, whatever things we are, confused, lonely. We have an old pattern of how we’re going to get through that that just somehow has not really worked that great. We can stop and somehow deconstruct, like soften around that hardened pattern, get brave around the ways that we avoid, whatever it is that we can come to that crossroads and rest, think, connect, and find some wisdom. Find some wisdom and do it differently. That’s magic. That builds the foundation for the life that we dream of, the life that we want. Such a rich thing these crossroads, and God knows, kazillions of crossroads, I do the same way, but those crossroads where I can stop and decenter, often by getting advice from wise, loving friends, or by doing this Inner Mentor Process, which is my favorite process in the world, and which many of you have done already. This is a crossroads process because again and again, when I’m at a stuck place, I do this Inner Mentor Process and I deconstruct my stuck place, and a breeze of wisdom comes in. I start to see the good there. I see the possibility. I see the potential. I soothe myself. I have a sense of grace, and then some wisdom pours in that’s just like essence of the best of me, and my ancestors, and the people that love me and support me, and my teachers. I can feel it. I can feel the goodness, the sweetness, the airiness, and the spaciousness of the insight that I am given when I’m at this crossroads, and I do the Inner Mentor Process, which I do pretty much every day, and I’d like to do a number of times every day. That’s a goal of mine. I would love to lead you in this process because this is a way to find a friend, and it’s the friend of the you that you were born to be. It’s a friend of the you that is soft, caring, wise, strong and grounded. It’s the you that people who love you get to see and feel at your best. It’s your magic place. Change is not an easy thing. We have a fierce, wired tendency to do the same things again and again.CLICK TO TWEET

Becoming Your Inner Mentor

Let’s do this. I’d like you to just close your eyes and just take a moment, and just relax. If you’ve had me do this Inner Mentor Process with you before, awesome, let’s do it again. You’re going to get a different set of guidance. Maybe you’ll get the same set of guidance but it will land in a different way. Get comfortable. I’d like you to remember a time that you felt really comfortable in your own skin; healthy, solid, good, and positive. Just remember a moment, a time when you felt that way. Don’t look for perfection in the way that you visualize this because my visualizations are like Swiss cheese, like moments of getting it, big moments if not, big holes. That’s fine. I love visualization because I accept that mine are like Swiss cheese. Give yourself that grace and that freedom. Also, you don’t have to have the perfect memory, just a general memory and even just little moments of glimpse. Do that and remember that very unique, good feeling of feeling right in your own skin. Now I want you to remember a time that you felt a deep and beautiful love. I would just ask that it not be like a memory that is traumatic, that traumatizes you, in other words, like someone who betrayed you. Even if the person is not alive and you might have sadness, but it still is not traumatic and it holds goodness, that’s a fine memory. A time that you felt filled with a big and great and deep love. It could have been a spiritual moment, it could have been in nature, it doesn’t matter. Just remember what that was like. Gently and graciously hold that memory. I think of it like a breeze with a beautiful scent. You don’t smell it all the time, but there are moments that you do, and then you just enjoy that. That’s how I’d like you to remember this moment, if that fits for you. Just hold that to your heart what that’s like. Now I’d like you to remember a time that you were at a crossroads, and you deconstructed an old way of behaving, and handled it in a better way and felt really good as a result. A time you did something different. You pivoted from an old, not helpful way. You did something wiser and it worked that it was good. Remember what that felt like, just hold that memory. Now I just want you to imagine the you that lives that way, like a you that is the enlightened you, that lives in the flow of those feelings. It’s an imagination. You don’t have to be there yet. You just imagine this you. On some level, it’s so close to you. It’s like a sibling. It’s so close because you know that you. It’s you. It’s the you you’re meant to be. It’s the you unblocked. It’s the you beautiful. Picture that you, imagine that you, full throttle, open, relaxed, present, essence of you. Now I want you to imagine that you become that you, just for the moment. It’s an imagination exercise, but it’s awesome, because it’s a practice to actually move toward becoming that you. Just imagine that you are that you, and that you actually step into that role. You step into the body, the heart and the face, behind the eyes of that you. In your guts, in your kishkes, in your heart, you’re you, in your fingertips. You are this you, and just feel and imagine what that’s like.

  Now, look at the you of today. I want you to speak out loud if you can or write it down. You can pause this if you like, and just take some time to let the words and the wisdom pool, and then unspool, and come out. Just take some time to do this. Share whatever guidance you want with the you of today. Good. Now, imagine opening your arms and now you’re hugging each other, and it’s the you of today and the you that you’re meant to be, your Inner Mentor, your full, full self. What that’s like to hug each other, to feel the differentness and the sameness. Feel that lovely hug, slowly open your eyes, come back, and what you wrote, what you said is your meditation for the day. That’s your perfect, couldn’t be better, daily meditation. All you have to do is love this message. By loving it, it will change you. By doing this process, the more you do it, the more you’re going to get close and friendly, and become that Inner Mentor self. I encourage you to use this in the slow, sloggy, confusing crossroads of dating, crossroads of all relationships. It’s so sweet and wonderful to know that you can tap into a place that has such goodness, wisdom and guidance. We need that guidance again and again. We need the kind, soft touch of caring guidance to help us steer right again and again. Thank you so much for listening to the 100th episode of the Deeper Dating Podcast, and I look forward to connecting with you in the next episode.

Table of Contents

• Write A Valentine’s Day Card
• Connect
• Discover Your Inner Dating Coach
• The Marriage Hack

In this episode, I’m going to share four beautiful, profound, and amazing hacks for deeper intimacy, especially for Valentine’s Day, whether you are single or coupled. Stay tuned to this episode. The 99th episode of the Deeper Dating Podcast. — Hello, everybody. Welcome to the 99th episode of the Deeper Dating Podcast. I’m Ken Page and I’m a psychotherapist. I’m the author of Deeper Dating and the Cofounder of DeeperDating.com, a space for people to meet online in an environment that is inspiring, warm, safe, and fun. Today, in this podcast for Valentine’s Day, I am going to share some very powerful, beautiful, and eye-opening hacks for deeper love for single people and for people who are in couples. This week and every week, I want to share with you the greatest tools that I know to help you find love and keep it flourishing, and heal your life in the process because the skills of dating are the skills of love, and the skills of love are the greatest and most important skills of all for a life that has happiness, joy, meaning, and comfort. If you want to know more about the deeper dating path to real intimacy, just go to DeeperDatingPodcast.com and you’ll receive free gifts. You’ll get a lot of free resources, and you’ll learn a lot more about using these ideas to transform your own intimacy journey.

  If you’re interested in DeeperDating.com to meet people, just go to DeeperDating.com, and you can sign up for free and start connecting in a very different way with people. I also want to say that everything I share in this podcast is educational in nature. It’s not medical or psychiatric advice or treatment. Also, I just want to say that if you like what you’re learning here, it would be a wonderful gift if you could subscribe and leave me a review. Thank you for letting me give that little plug there, and let’s dive in. I want to start with single folks, having lived for decades as a single person looking for a relationship. I was reading recently about a research and what it says about what to do when you just wake up in the middle of the night, and you can’t go back to sleep because something is bothering you. That happens to me sometimes. I was very interested in this. What it said is that the research shows that one technique that really works is that you have paper and a pen right next to you by the bed. If you wake up and something is spinning around in your head, you will have a much better chance of getting to sleep if you do this. You write down what the issue is, and you make a commitment to yourself that you are going to tackle this in a conscious and thoughtful way, and then you are much more likely to be able to get past the anxiety and go to sleep. I think that that concept with something difficult, taking some kind of a conscious action is so important. Valentine’s Day, a suggestion for a process that you can do. First, I think it’s a great thing to celebrate in some way by nourishing yourself, whether that’s being alone, ordering insanely fabulous take out, having a Zoom call, or depending on who you can be with, being with somebody who you really love and feel safe with, and making a commitment. Creating a contract with yourself that in the year ahead, you are going to find a path, an approach to finding love that is deep, smart, practical and suits you, and that you’re going to commit to it. That’s going to take a bit of research to find the work that speaks to you the most, and you can search and search for a teacher whose work really speaks to you. There are a number of great teachers out there. Finding the work that really speaks to you, and then getting a learning partner, a buddy, or joining a community of people doing that same kind of work if that teacher has an ongoing kind of course going on. Because the research shows that the way to create change that lasts is to find a template of understanding that is wiser to you, and then find a community or a person with whom you can have support. Those are the keys. Those are the research-backed keys. We live in great poverty of understanding what our deepest gifts are, and that makes us spin around in circles.CLICK TO TWEETIf you make this next year one where you make that commitment, the gifts will be absolutely incredible because as you up-level your skillset at finding love, as you infuse wisdom, goodness, care, smarts, and discrimination into your search for love, you will feel better about yourself. You will feel more like you have a beautiful backbone. Your own unique flavor of wisdom will begin to take over the way that you do things, and you’ll have support at those crossroads where you get triggered in old ways. You’ll have a person with their arm around your shoulder, even though not literally, probably, saying to you what they see. That drop of infusion of wisdom from someone else at a juncture where there’s been tightness, fear, discomfort, and anger just makes all the difference in the world. It makes me think of Dorothy when she took that oil can, and she would just oil the joints of the Tin Man, and then he could move again. That is I think what happens when we get to these really reactive and difficult junctures, and somebody tells us something wise, and we soften and loosen. I’ve had that happen to me so many times in my intimacy life. I rely on that. I don’t know where I would be without that softening, wisening influence. If you give yourself that Valentine’s gift, I think it’s one of the most beautiful and precious gifts that you could give yourself.

Write A Valentine’s Day Card

Now, I want to share one for couples. This is actually one that is not just for couples, but it’s a great one for couples. Here’s what it is. You’re going to be probably writing a Valentine’s Day card. If you’re not, I really encourage you to. I encourage you in this card to really take the time to describe the things you most love, most respect, and most learn from about your partner. It’s easy to say that you love them and why you love them. That’s great. We want that in the card, but to then say what you respect them deeply for about who they are, and then getting really vulnerable. What you learned from them, what they teach you, because you’re with them, because they have gifts that you’re trying to cultivate that they’re better at, and of course, vice versa. You can make a pact that the two of you write this letter to each other. That’s even more fabulous, but in it, you put in all the words of what you love, respect, adore, and are attracted to about them. It feels very vulnerable to do it, but when you do it from that place, you will feel your Eros begin to loosen up like that same squeaky tin can thing. You will find your heart and your love begins to loosen, and your Eros begin to loosen up again. It’s also a really important process because we live in a kind of great poverty of understanding what our deepest gifts are, and that makes us spin around in circles. It’s very hard to go forward into a difficult world if we can’t name the treasures of our being, our Core Gifts which often have been stepped on or taken advantage of, but which are the treasures of our being in which our life’s task is to learn to become heroes around those qualities.

  Your loved one can name those for you. It’s a beautiful process and it will last. It will last for you because of the things you get taught, because we need to be instructed in our deepest gifts, and the things that your partner will learn, the closeness that will happen, the way that both of you will be able to rest in a place of, “This is what they think of me. They might be really annoyed at me now. I might have been a pain in the ass. We might be going through a really difficult time, but there’s a shelf I can rest on, which is they do think this about me. They feel this about me.” We can hold that to our hearts and reframe, and rename our journey based on that understanding. We can move ahead remembering how much we’re loved by this person, because it’s so easy to stop remembering in day-to-day life how much this person treasures us, loves us, needs us, adores us, not at all moments, but in an essential general way. That is a practice that the two of you could do together, or the three of you. It is just fabulous. You can do it with anybody you love. This could be a Valentine’s gift. I love when my child was really little, everybody gave Valentines to everybody else. There are these little tiny Valentine’s and everybody gave them to everybody. I think that’s what Valentine’s Day should be. You could do this process to single folks with friends and coupled folks, you can do this with other people that you love too.

Connect

Next, single folks. There are so many different things. This is just a quick one, but I want to encourage you to look at the new wave of dating sites and functionalities using video, using ways to connect. I will say that my husband and I have put heart and soul into this new event, which is called Deeper Dating. It’s actually experience events online as well as an online platform. It’s built with love and for love. It’s built to incubate intimacy every step of the way throughout the process. We’d love to have you joined and you can join for free, and connect with people for free too, and hear about upcoming events in your area. This gives me great joy to be able to tell you about.

Discover Your Inner Dating Coach

The next kind of process or hack that I would love to share with you is one of my very favorite processes in the world. I do it pretty much every day. I have a buddy that we share our Inner Mentor Processes with. I’m going to tell you what it is. You’re going to discover your inner dating coach. Just follow me along with this. I just want you to imagine yourself, and I’m going to keep it pretty brief. You can find recordings of this. There’s an entire episode, it’s episode number three, focused on this exercise, but here’s a quick one. I like you to remember a time that you felt like your love was flowing freely and beautifully. There was that wonderful sense of love, not with someone who betrayed you. It doesn’t have to be with someone you’re with now, but when you do it, I don’t want you to do it about a relationship where there’s the flavor of betrayal in it. When we get to these really reactive and difficult junctures, and somebody tells us something wise, we soften and loosen.CLICK TO TWEETSomeone with whom you could think of this, and remember the good in a very rich way. A time that you felt like really the love flowing between you and another person. It does not have to be a romantic partner. It could be a child, it could be a grandparent, it could be anything, it could be a pet, but the way that it feels for you when love is flowing, when that oil can has really lubricated your being and love is moving through you. You don’t have to remember perfectly, but just remember the wonderfulness of that. I want you to remember a time that you felt really comfortable in your own skin, and how marvelous that feels to feel comfortable in your own skin. It could be at any point in your life, and you don’t have to bring it back perfectly. It could be a gentle wisp of a memory that comes in and out. It doesn’t have to be really strong or crisp by the time that you felt that and how that felt. We’re going to do one more. A time that you got through a relationship difficulty in a really good way with someone who could listen to you, where the two of you moved to a new positive place together, and you remember that there was learning in it and growth for you. It didn’t have to be a big change, but it was something where you said, “I’ve just learned something about how to love and how that felt,” how that feels in your heart. Now, I just want you to imagine, and it’s a fantasy, a you who loves freely as you, a you who stands in his or her or their own feet, loving as you are from the heart, and the soul, and the core of who you are. This is just you, like the you that you’re meant to be when you’re fully unfurled in love. Just picture that. You don’t have to earn it or be it right now, but just imagine it. Imagine what this being’s face looks like, how it feels in this being’s heart. Now, I’d like you to imagine that you jump into this self, this inner mentor, this you that you’re meant to be. Just jump in, it’s a fantasy. It’s just a fantasy, but it’s also not a fantasy because you know what it feels like on some level to be this being, because you’re in some ways almost there. Feel, imagine that you are there. You are actually there, you are this you, and look at the you of today. Right now, in your intimacy journey, from this place of essence of wonderful, unfurled you, what do you want to say to the you of today? If you have paper and pen, write it down, otherwise speak it out loud or whisper it, or just think it. Take a minute to do this. You can pause this for as long as you like. That is your inner mentor message. You can go back and do this so quickly. You could do it at the drop of a hat once you get comfortable, really quick. I promise you, at the crossroads of your intimacy choices when you do this, the response you get, the wisdom you get will move you in a different direction at those crossroads. Every one of those directions weaves you in a different life direction, in a different life pattern, and weaves you and moves you closer to richer, deeper love. Try this. Have this inner mentor be a dear partner to you. The other gift that happens with this is that the more you do it, the more you become that inner mentor, the more comfortable you are living in that amazing space. This is a treasure of an exercise, and I encourage you to use it, to do it, to do it every day, to do it really quickly, but watch what happens. You’re just going to love what happens.

 

The Marriage Hack

Next, this is for couples and it’s pretty cool. It’s called the marriage hack. This is a technique that is very highly researched. It was developed by Eli Finkel, a very renowned relationship expert and researcher. The marriage hack, and you can do this with close friends too. You can do it in all kinds of relationships, but this is an exercise that what Eli says is that it is the best 21 minutes that you will spend all year if you want to improve your life. The research shows that the quality of your spousal relationship affects the quality of your life more than anything else, including your health. It’s pretty wild. By healing the quality of our spousal relationships, we just bring so much more love and ease into our lives, and meaning, and possibility. If you look at a graph of the trajectory of marital or spousal relationship quality, you don’t have to be married, but it’s a committed relationship. If you look at a graph, you see that virtually, almost every couple, the quality of their connection decreases the quality of their communication, of their listening, of their treasuring. It gently decreases year after year. It’s a downward slope that’s almost universal, not a quick one in the cases of most healthy relationships but it’s a downward slope. This exercise, basically wherever you’re at, it won’t raise you to a higher level of your slope, other things will, but it will stop the slope from going downward, which is why the sooner you begin this process, Eli says, the better for you. Here’s what it is. It’s very much like the Inner Mentor Process. You could actually even add the Inner Mentor Process if you like. Here’s what it is, 21 minutes. The first thing that each of you do together is to think about a recent argument. It’s an argument that kind of captures a stuck point in your relationship. It’s a kind of argument or stuck place that happens again and again. You are going to write down the experience of a recent argument where this happened to you. Maybe it’s nagging, maybe it’s around sex, maybe it’s not feeling listened to, maybe it’s differences in how you relate to money, or the children, or politics. First, just write down what that is, then you’re going to write three different things. Each of them is going to take seven minutes long. You’re going to think of this conflict and you’re going to imagine a neutral third-party that wants the best for everybody, wants the best for both of you and for the two of you as a couple, and for each of you individually. A neutral third-party that wants that. You may even tweak that a little bit I think, and make it like a very wise-being. The research shows doing this exercise with thinking of a neutral third-party who wants the best for everybody. You’re going to write about what this neutral third-party would tell the two of you to do to handle this. Again, a neutral wise third-party who wants the best for both of you. Write down seven minutes what this person would say to the two of you to help you both get through this. The second question you’ll answer for another seven minutes, each of you will do this, is what do you think are the obstacles that you’re going to confront when you try to adopt this new approach or perspective? You’re going to write about the obstacles that you think will happen for you as you try to make this change. Both of you do that, seven minutes. The third seven minutes is you write down what you can do individually and as a couple to surmount those obstacles. What Eli says is that the greatest determinant of a healthy relationship is how the couple handles conflict. That’s the greatest determinant of a good relationship. This gives both of you the space to think in really different ways, and to think in more conscious, more caring, and more compassionate ways. What Eli says is that the research shows that the two of you get to do this together. You might not want to do it on Valentine’s Day because it could be a little difficult, or you might want to do it on Valentine’s Day. You do this 21 minutes once a year. The research clearly shows there’s beautiful and dramatic results. These are four different hacks that I’m very excited to share with you. Each of them will open up a world and open up your world to becoming that person who you were born to be, who you’re meant to be, who can love more fully, richly and wisely. We know there is nothing better than that. The knowledge that you’re going to tackle this will change your Valentine’s Day for the richer and the better. All my best to all of you on this Valentine’s Day, and on your entire future journey in intimacy. I look forward to seeing you on the next episode.

Table of Contents

• • Gifts Deep In Our Core
  • Unleashing The Undomesticated Genius

How To Discover Your Core Gifts In Your Most Challenging Qualities

How to handle those parts of ourselves that get us in trouble again and again in our lives? Stay tuned to this episode where you’ll learn how to work with those parts of yourself and discover the gift that lies at their core. Hello and welcome to the Deeper Dating Podcast. I’m Ken Page. I’m a psychotherapist. I’m the author of the book Deeper Dating and the Cofounder of DeeperDating.com, a new way for people to meet online that is based on values of kindness, decency, and respect. Today in this episode, I’m going to talk about how you can discover your deepest core gifts right in the heart of your biggest personal challenges. This week and every week, I’m going to share with you the greatest tools that I know to help you find love, and keep it flourishing, and heal your life in the process, because the skills of dating are nothing more than the skills of intimacy. Those are the greatest skills of all for a happy and rich life. If you want to learn more about the deeper dating path to real intimacy, just go to DeeperDatingPodcast.com and you can sign on for my mailing list, or go to DeeperDating.com if you’re single and interested in looking for a relationship in a much healthier way. I also want to say that everything I share in this podcast is educational in nature. It’s not medical or psychiatric advice or treatment. Finally, if you like what you’re hearing and learning here, I’d love it if you could subscribe and leave me a review. Thank you so much and let’s jump in.

Gifts Deep In Our Core

In this very early part of our new year, I want to share a counterintuitive approach to change that I find tremendously exciting. Here’s the central idea – It’s that our deepest wounds, and bewilderments, and complications spring from our deepest gifts. Gifts that we have not learned how to handle and bare their power and their sensitivity as fully as we need to. By acknowledging these gifts, taking time to name them, and learning to treasure them and honor them, we can speed and deepen our own healing, and definitely our search for love. Our deepest wounds, bewilderments, and complications spring from our deepest gifts.CLICK TO TWEETIn these podcast episodes, in my book Deeper Dating, and in my course, I talk about the concept of Core Gifts. Those are the places of deepest sensitivity, tenderness, passion, and meaning within us. They’re the places where we have the greatest capacity to love and to create. They are also the places where most of us have been profoundly hurt. They are the places that we tend to either suppress our real self or act out our real self and get in trouble. These are our trigger spots because they are a place of deepest sensitivity. They are the places where the nerve endings of our being are the richest and most full. They are incredibly important.

  I really believe that more than almost anything else, it’s our relationship to these Core Gifts that determines what our life looks like, and what our relationships look like, and what we can create in the world in all of those arenas. In my six-month intensives, we spend almost half of the intensive focusing on being able to name our Core Gifts, discover our Core Gifts, and celebrate and dignify them. I think it’s an incredibly rich subject because these Core Gifts speak to the very DNA of your being. When we are in the right relationship with our essential self, we do so much better in choosing partners and in maintaining relationships and growing. Our Core Gifts are strands of potential greatness within us. When we express them, we feel most alive and empowered, or most frighteningly vulnerable and raw. Core Gifts are not the same as strengths and they’re not the same as talents. In fact, a lot of time they feel like our greatest weaknesses because there’s such vulnerability around them. Because their power can be so great, that it takes a lifetime of work to learn how to handle these gifts to help them grow up, mature in the world, get legs, act and fulfill their mission, and learn the skills that are needed. Like with any greatness or any genius, there’s a great deal of skill-building that needs to happen. This is a question that I have asked before. I’d like you to think about this for a minute. Which of your own sensitivities and passions have more often felt like a curse than a gift to you? That is a sign of a Core Gift, or another question, “What tender parts of you have often been really misunderstood in the world or taken advantage of?” Those are other signs. What positive experiences in your life touch the heart of what matters most to you? It’s another sign. Because in pain or in joy, the great marker of a Core Gift is the depth of meaning that lies there. It’s the sense of our humanity. The closer we feel to the beating heart of our own or another’s humanity and meaning, the closer we are to our own deepest gifts. As a psychotherapist or as a coach, when I try to understand my client’s deepest conundrums, struggles, and challenges, I lean into it in this way. What is the Core Gift that’s trying to express itself in the heart of this struggle? Often, the answer just can’t be reduced to a word or a phrase or anything like that. It’s often just a deep feeling. Often, we need the insight of other people to help us decipher our own gifts, and that is really true. How do we handle the parts of ourselves that get us in trouble again and again in our lives? In this episode, you'll learn a much more powerful way to work with them, and you'll also discover the gift that lies at their core.CLICK TO TWEETIt’s almost impossible to understand the beauty, the power, the value, the preciousness of our gifts if people don’t reflect back to us what they are, and how to see them. This is an amazing starvation that occurs in this world, is that people don’t tell each other the gifts that they see in each other in a direct, clear way, using their wisdom and their insight to do that. When I do workshops and when I do classes and I do courses, that’s always a part of it. Because I think we need to be instructed into the value of our gifts and the quality of our gifts. We often need to be instructed. We’re not going to figure it out ourselves. We won’t understand it fully. We won’t have that moment of realization of how we’ve impacted people’s lives. That honoring of the gifts is so much at the heart of this, and I’ll get to that in a couple of minutes. I want to say that learning to bear the passion, the vulnerability, the sensitivity, the originality, and coming from all different directions in ways that we can’t really easily understand. These parts of ourselves, these core gifts, it’s a task of a lifetime to be able to make space for them, to honor them, to see their treasure, and to learn their language. I’m going to share a personal example of that. The experience of guilt has been a lifelong burden for me, a core wound for me. I’ve made a lot of progress, but I still am prone to guilt. It’s a weight that I carry to one degree or another, frequently. It used to be constantly. Now, it’s frequently. I feel responsible in some ways for way too much, way too often. Knowing what I know, I approach that guilt wound on my good days in a new way. I look for the Core Gift in it. I’ve been reminded to do this by people who know me and love me, and see the gift there because I’d get lost in that guilt myself, and I do. The minute I do that, the minute I look for the Core Gift, things become clear, and it’s empathy. It’s a deep empathy, care, and concern, which doesn’t mean that I can’t be selfish and lots of other things. It means that that empathy is a deep quality in my being, that I experienced a lot of pain around when I feel like I haven’t done something right, or even a deeper, more generic kind of pain. That’s the gift that led me to become a therapist. It’s the gift that fuels a fierce protectiveness I have for the people I love, for my children, for my partner, for my family, for the children that were separated and put in cages at the border. It’s a gift that somehow in a strange way, also leaves me feeling responsible, like feeling responsible for my parent’s suffering at the hands of Hitler or my son’s ancestors’ horrors in the Killing Fields of Cambodia. This guilt is not perfectly healthy for sure, but it’s part of my genius. It’s roots spring from the depths of what makes me who I am, my fierce protectiveness, my compassion, my caring. I’m not saying that I’m this perfect embodiment of that or anywhere near it, because I have a lot of other parts too. That part of me is very real. That guilt that weighs me down has its roots in my very ability to love.

Unleashing The Undomesticated Genius

How does that awareness lead to healing for me, for us? How could we use this knowledge to heal our wounds and liberate the gifts trapped inside them? The first thing is to understand the gifts that lie there, that come out in convulsive, and immature, and imperfect ways, but something is coming out. Something is trying to be spoken, known and seen, and understood. We have to find what that is. You might want to take a minute right now and think about a quality in your being, in your personality that has this intensity that maybe you’ve wondered, is it too intense? Is it too sensitive? Is it too tender? Is it too demanding? I would say that the task is to find the Core Gift that lies there. Maybe it’s a quality of not enough, like, “I’m too quiet, I’m too tender, I’m too passive.” In those cases as well, there is a gift that lies there. For example, qualities of passion have this “something really matters to you”, and we want to find what that is, what that thing is that mattered to you in that situation so much again and again. Maybe it’s truth. Maybe it’s a connection. Those are some of the things that we can get really passionate about.

  Maybe it’s needing space. Maybe it’s needing freedom, but if these things come up again and again, there is a Core Gift. There is a germ, a seed of something that is aching to be expressed and probably has not been fully honored. What does it work for all those reasons is simple willpower. Telling ourselves that we have to stop, that we have to become more mature. For me, that I have to get more adult and realistic about where my responsibility ends. As seductive as that simple approach seems, use your willpower, use your smarts, use your logic. I have found that it has very little leverage. It’s one of the weakest tools that there is. This is what I’ve come to see as the step that is the most important. This quality of yours that you thought of, what if each of us in these arenas sees the humanity at the heart of the wound? What it was we were aching for? What it was that hurt us? What it was that we needed? It’s hard to do that when we’re upset at ourselves. It’s hard to do it when we’re upset at someone else who didn’t treat us right. The act of saying, “This makes emotional sense. This is what I was trying to do. Not well, imperfectly, but this is what I was trying to do.” A dignifying of that Core Gift, to me, is what I think the first step, the most important step. For example for me, the care that fuels my guilt is what’s best about me. Even though my guilt creates like whole slews of problems, it’s still the size of my caring that gets me in trouble. As much as I might want to manage to reduce that caring to a simpler, easier, more handleable level, that will never work. I can’t amputate my soul. Our Core Gifts spring from a source more profound and more essential than anything that we can control. If we shift, if you think about what is the core gift in that pain, in that sensitivity, in that passion that you experience again and again, whatever it is that you’re picking up. Maybe you could think of it as like, “This is the thing that gets me in trouble in my relationships.” I, fill in the blank. The task here is to feel the humanity behind what that is and to name it, and to see the gift in it. Until we cherish the gift at the heart of our flaws, we're going to live in knots and miss out on the magic that makes us who we are.CLICK TO TWEETWhen we do that, when we say it makes sense, maybe it doesn’t make the perfect logical sense, but it makes sense in terms of who I am and what matters to me, and my wounds, and all the different parts of me. It makes sense that this made me feel that way. When we can do that, we dignify those feelings. We’re much more likely to avoid the two great dangers at a moment like that. One is suppression of what our needs are because we feel ashamed, or our feelings are because we feel ashamed. The other is acting out, expressing those things in a way that is unkind or doesn’t have empathy, or doesn’t take the other person into account, or forgets how much this person loves us and cares about us, and all that they’ve done for us. Those are two ways that we can get stuck. When we begin by saying, “Yeah, this is a treasure,” all of a sudden, we are holding it like the parents that we wish we had. When we begin by feeling the mystery and the humanity in our gifts, something different happens. When we name the gift and we honor it, and find the inner logic, worth, sense, and truth of it, something else happens. We become more human, more balanced, and more chill. Finally, whole new doorways of possibilities begin to unfold. I want to say here too, as much as I might want to embrace my gifts of empathy, for example, as much as we might want to fully embrace our gifts, often we can’t because our Core Gifts, there could be so much pain there, so much longing, even so much joy and so much meaning. There’s a fierceness. There’s a depth. They touch the very marrow of our being. That’s where they come from, the very core of our being. It stands to reason that their humanity would be hard to bear. I think of those qualities not as attributes but as portals. I think of them as portals to something so vast, something so mysterious, in my opinion, something so holy because I wouldn’t care that much if it wasn’t. This way of looking at the world, this way of looking at conflict and argument and confusion is so much kinder. It allows space. It gives us that kind of core where we can move around and be more agile in handling the complexities and pains that come up, when we hold it with that kind of kindness. How do we do this though? If these feelings are so hard to bear, I think that what we need to do is gradually over years, practice exposing ourselves to our Core Gift in small doses with a sense of treasure and dignity. Gradually increase our tolerance for their beauty, their bigness, their tenderness, and all the challenges that they give us. How do you live in the world with this much empathy? How do you live in the world with this much caring? How do you live in the world with this much fierce sense of justice? Whatever for you these qualities are, I think that the key is to acknowledge that there’s a treasure in you, that is a mystery that you will be unfolding and unfurling and discovering for your whole life, but that it is the fuel of the life that you want, and the richness that you want. Our deepest gifts can definitely grow. They can mature and they need to mature. When we do this, we can finally parent them. It’s like parenting a fiercely gifted child, but those gifts can never be domesticated. They will never fit into the small and safe and well-mannered boxes that we think we’re supposed to create for them.

  They’re going to continue to get us in trouble. They’re going to cajole us to the edge of authenticity. They’re going to cause tears that we don’t understand. They’re going to shock us with their truths because genius domesticated is genius lost. Genius has fire and challenge, and that’s a gift. We spend so much time trying to get these Core Gifts to listen to us, to behave correctly, and to line up in a nice row, to do what we tell them. Guess who loses that battle again and again? Until we cherish the gift at the heart of our flaws, we’re going to live in knots. More importantly, we’re going to miss out on the magic that makes us who we are and which allows the precious people who are made for us to finally discover where we are. This new year, my wish is that all of you, and that I, get to feel more deeply and treasure more kindly and fully the deep gifts living at the heart of our struggles. That we allow ourselves an answerless awe at their mystery, their beauty, and their humanity. Thank you so much for joining me in this episode of the Deeper Dating Podcast. I look forward to seeing you in the next episode

• Love Never Dies
• Dialoguing With A Dead Loved On
• In Memory Of John McNeill

A Life-Changing Exercise for Everyone Who Has Lost A Loved One

Wisdom from Dr. Jamie Turndorf’s book, Love Never Dies: How to Reconnect and Make Peace with the Deceased

In this episode, I’m excited to bring you a life-changing exercise for anyone who has lost a loved one, so stay tuned to this episode of the Deeper Dating Podcast. — Hello, everybody, and welcome to the Deeper Dating Podcast. I’m Ken Page and I’m a psychotherapist, author of the book Deeper Dating, and Cofounder of DeeperDating.com, which is a site to help single people meet online in a way that’s respectful, kind and inspiring. Today, I’m going to be talking about a powerful process, a life-changing exercise for anyone who has lost a loved one. This week and every week, I’m going to share with you the greatest tools that I know to help you find love and keep it flourishing, and heal your life in the process because the skills of dating are nothing more than the skills of love, and the skills of love are the greatest skills of all for a happy life. If you want to learn more about the deeper dating path to real intimacy, just go to DeeperDatingPodcast.com. If you sign up for my mailing list, you’ll get free gifts and learn a lot more about how to use these ideas to transform your own intimacy journey. You’ll also find a complete transcript of every episode. I also want to say that everything I’m going to be sharing is educational in nature. It’s not medical or psychiatric advice or treatment, and if you’re experiencing any serious psychological or psychiatric conditions or symptoms, please seek professional help. Finally, if you like what you’re learning here, I would so appreciate it if you could subscribe and leave me a review. Thank you and let’s jump in. Many of us have lost people we love. Many of us are still suffering from those losses, and maybe even feel blocked in their ability to move on. Many of us might not feel blocked in our ability to move on, but might not have had the healing that we could potentially have with someone even after they pass. I think the greatest secret to a love-filled life is cherishing the relationships that we have already. That includes relationships with people who have passed. Today, I want to share a simple but profoundly healing exercise for anyone who’s lost a loved one. Until wounds are healed, we will continue to be limited in terms of our capacity to find a new relationship.CLICK TO TWEETI’ve often heard people say that they can feel the presence of loved ones who have died. I have to admit that usually, I have felt a pang of envy when I heard those words. This has happened to me. I have experienced it, but I haven’t usually experienced it when I’ve lost people I love and treasure. For me, when I’ve lost a loved one, not in all cases but in most cases, it’s like the door just shuts. It doesn’t shut on my grief, but it shuts on my sense of access to that relationship. After reading Love Never Dies: How to Reconnect and Make Peace with the Deceased by Dr. Jamie Turndorf, I find that that is beginning to change. Although unlike Dr. Turndorf, I’m still somewhat of an agnostic on the subject of, is it actual communication with people who have passed? This episode is for people who believe there is actual communication and those who aren’t sure, and those who just don’t believe it. These exercises apply to everyone.

Our cultural training around death can close down a wealth of available love and inner guidance that comes from a sense of connection to people we’ve lost, whether or not we believe that their spirit is still alive. Almost none of us have been taught about the power of creating an inner dialogue with people we’ve lost. In the spirituality of many Eastern religions, and also in that of many indigenous cultures, there are really strong beliefs that an ongoing connection with our ancestors links us to the very core of our life’s meaning, but few of us are taught how to create that connection. Dr. Turndorf says, “When we don’t reconnect and work out unfinished business with those who have passed, we limp through life dragging our unhealed wounds.” I just want to say that so many of us have had broken hearts in love, and it’s not as though the person has passed away, but as though there’s been such a profound loss that we are left sometimes feeling like we’re limping through life. Until those wounds are healed, it limits us in terms of our capacity to find a new relationship. This exercise applies as well to situations where we’ve lost a loved one, not through death but through a breakup. I found in my own life that when loved ones die, somehow they’ve become elevated in my mind. That has held me back from cherishing my connection with them as fully as I would have liked to. I’m a 64-year-old gay man. I have survived through the AIDS crisis. I have lost a lot of people. I’m a 64-year-old man, so I’ve lost a number of people already right there too. When these loved ones were alive, I reached out to them as often as I wanted, but after they passed, I lost that inner freedom to converse with them in my own mind. It would be a thing if I wanted to reach out to them because I would be hit with this immense gulf of the loss of them, which I somehow didn’t believe I could crossover, traverse, communicate through or past.

I began to feel awkward and also less deserving because of guilt. The ways that I have not been there for that person, the ways that I’ve let them down, the ways that I didn’t show up, and the ways that I wasn’t there enough. Those guilts became magnified when there was no chance to make them up anymore. Was I a good enough friend? Was I a good enough grandson? Was I a good enough mentee? Was I a good enough mentor? Those doubts led me to deny myself a sense of free access to their presence. Once the really sharp waves of grief had passed, I placed my loved ones on this precious but dusty shelf, just relegating our relationship to the past. In her book, Dr. Turndorf teaches a method for dialoguing with departed people. Also, this can be used for people that we have broken up with and have ended relationships with or they have with us, but it holds tremendous healing potential for everyone in those situations. Dr. Turndorf is really passionate in her certainty that we can communicate with people we’ve lost, and I hope that’s true, especially after the passing of my father, where amazing things happened. I’ll share a story. This is quite an amazing story. I felt my dad’s presence after he passed in a way that I hadn’t felt at all as much with most other relationships where I lost people. I got used to feeling this with my dad. I remember at one point, I said to my dad, “Could you give me a sign?” Folks, I swear this really happened. My husband has his office and I walked by his office to the bedroom and sticking out of his door on the floor was a photograph of my dad’s big hand and my child’s little baby hand in his. It was not there when I passed previously. I believed it more with him. I felt his presence in a different way, but that’s not something that I’ve always had. I just wanted to share that story. There is something that I found again and again, and that is my relationship with lost loved ones, when I take it off that precious and somewhat dusty shelf, can come to life again through this process that I’m going to teach you of dialoguing from Dr. Turndorf. Old wounds can be healed and really we can feel the warmth of past love in our bodies and our hearts. I know that many of you know that already. My dad, he was a Holocaust survivor. I’ve talked about him in a previous episode. I think I called that one, Losing Love and Finding It Again. My dad was a teenager when he and his mom were wrenched apart in a way that was unimaginable during the Holocaust, and he never saw her again. Somehow, he went on to create a life that was full of love, family and success, but that unspeakable pain remained inside of him. Half a century, after he was liberated from concentration camp, and I dragged him to a workshop. In that workshop, he was asked to have a conversation with a loved one who died and he chose his mom. He remembered her really vividly and he spoke to her. Maybe it was the first time that he ever spoke to her since he saw her that day. He realized, it really hit him without a doubt, exactly what she would say to him, and that moment was life-changing. This is what he imagined. He imagined his mom looking at him and looking at his life and he knew she would say, “Eric, look what a beautiful family you’ve created. Look what a good life you have now. I’m so proud of you.” He had never had the gift of knowing that that’s what she would say and of having that window onto his current life until he did that exercise. Forgiveness is not an obligation. It is not a requirement. It is an organic gift that comes with intention and desire over time.CLICK TO TWEETThat exercise brought him a profound healing. One that none of us could ever have imagined even being possible. We felt the change in him after that. It was like a giant knot had finally unknotted inside him. Since reading this beautiful book, Love Never Dies, which describes the dialogue process in great detail, I have used Dr. Turndorf’s technique and it has opened life-changing doors for me. It’s a powerful process and I encourage everyone who feels ready to give it a try. Dr. Turndorf generously agreed to share her instructions for this process, and I’m going to tell you her words, and maybe you could even do them now. You can absolutely pause as you do it. As long as you’re not operating heavy machinery or driving, you can even sort of do it as you walk, sit, reflect or whatever it is that you’re doing. The first step is to make an effort to be more still and quiet. I’m excited and happy to be leading you in this. The idea is to create pockets of peace – moments in which you sit in silence, so you turn off the TV, the radio, the cell phone, and your computer, even if only for ten minutes. You just sit in some silence. Dr. Turndorf says, “In Love Never Dies, I share a lot of exercises for connecting with loved ones. The most powerful is my dialoguing with the departed technique.” Again, you don’t have to believe in life after death, and it could even be done with people who are still alive, but there’s been a breakup or a silence. You first find your stillness as she described, and then you speak back and forth with whoever it is that you want to contact. You talk aloud and you make a first statement, and then you just be open to what comes back in. It might be a picture, a thought or a sensation. You might want to try that now, and then you can write down or record if you have that capacity with you. If not, don’t worry, but you could write down and record not only what you say, but definitely what you hear, speaking aloud both your part and also what you hear or imagine or sense coming back. You just keep dialoguing back and forth for as long as you wish. You can dialogue to get support and guidance or to just reconnect. This can also be like an inner mentor process that I teach, where you connect with your wisest self, because you can get such wisdom from this process. You could say goodbye to the person. If someone was ripped from you, you can say goodbye to their physical body. If it was a traumatic ending, you can share what that was like for you. You can say goodbye in whatever way you wish, but above all, you can dialogue to heal any unfinished business. Now, if a death is really raw, traumatic or evokes PTSD symptoms, you would want to do this in the presence of a therapist or a very skilled and trained clinical facilitator. Going back to the experience, the good news is you do not have to force forgiveness on yourself. I deeply believe in the concept that forgiveness is not an obligation. It is not a requirement. It is an organic gift that comes with intention and desire over time, honesty, and with the help of dialogue. Using this technique, just pick up where you’re stuck with this person and just keep talking back and forth until you begin to sense a kind of quality of resolution. As you repeat this technique, it can heal a lot of emotional negative issues or struggles that remain with you. After reading this book, I tried this dialogue with two loved ones. I did it with my dear friend, Michael, who died of AIDS in 1991, and I’ve talked about him a bunch.

  I also did it with my grandmother, who died at 99 years old, as me and my sister were coming back with my infant baby from Cambodia after I adopted him. In both cases, just the act of remembering how it felt to be with them brought this warm kind of living memory of their presence. Was it their actual presence? Was it real? It felt real to me, but the question didn’t concern me because the love that we shared was unequivocally real and that’s what I felt. It felt almost as alive as it ever had. In that conjured sense of memory, I felt their loving concern for me. I got a dose of their familiar guidance and presence. Their presence moved me, just like it did so many times during my life and their life. I was struck by the fact that I denied myself this poignant gift for so long because I felt like I didn’t deserve it, because I felt like it wasn’t real, because I felt like it was not what one does. Ridiculous kind of things really, because there was a world of rich relationships that were hard-won, that were crafted over decades, and were still available to me. If nothing else, in their living presence inside me, in the ways that they had imprinted me and still lived inside of me. Their kind but sharp wisdom could be resurrected in present time just by remembering them and having a dialogue.

In Memory Of John Neill

Just to share one more story, I was privileged to spend some of the last days of his life with my dear friend and mentor, John McNeill. John was a priest who wrote a book called Taking a Chance on God and The Church and the Homosexual, who was kicked out of the Jesuit order by Benedict, who was then I believe Cardinal and became Pope later, for being gay. He was an LGBT activist and he changed my life, and the lives of countless other people. Another time, I’ll talk about what he meant to me. I had to leave John the day before he died. I’m just going to share one more story. John loved vichyssoise. It was a soup that he really loved. On the last day before that, as he was really moving toward passing, he just looked up and he said, “vichyssoise.” I made this my mission and I took a taxi 20 miles or something to this one place that was open that had vichyssoise in Fort Lauderdale. I got it for him and brought it back. My dear friend, the activist Brendan Fay and I, late at night, fed that to John on a little sponge, but then we got rid of the sponge because who wants to eat good food off a sponge? We used a tiny spoon. He loved it and he smiled. That was the story of how I got to give a very precious last wish to someone who had helped me and healed me in so many ways. Anyway, that next day, I had to leave. It was the day before John passed and the room was filled with his loved ones, but I gave myself the gift of asking for some moments alone with him. That’s something I learned from the passing of another friend where I didn’t give myself that gift. I bent down toward his ear and I just whispered a stream of pure gratitude to him. I told him how he changed my life, how he brought me back to the me that I had given up in my childhood. I told him how he helped me overcome old childhood shame, not just of being gay, but even a deeper shame at being me. I thanked him for growing me back to the parts of myself that I had given up so many years ago, parts that allowed me the gift of my current personal life and my professional life. He gave that to me. He gave it back to me because of what he saw in me. I felt a resolve never to put our relationship on that old dusty shelf. I just drank him in. I looked into his sweet face and I just filled myself with him. I knew that I would be coming back to visit him. That was a gift that I no longer had to deny myself. I hope that this exercise sounds helpful to you. I hope you try it and use it. I think you’ll find incredible riches from it. I also encourage you if this interests you, to look for Dr. Turndorf’s book, Love Never Dies. Thank you all for listening to this, a very kind of different episode. I look forward to seeing you in the next episode of the Deeper Dating Podcast.

Table of Contents

• Last Episode Recap
• Deconstruction And Rewriting
• Core Gift

How To Change The Script Of Your Love Life

Your Myth Of Lost Love: Part 2

How do you truly change the script of your dating life so the same kind of patterns in situations don’t keep happening again and again? Stay tuned to this episode of the Deeper Dating Podcast to learn how. — Hello, and welcome to the Deeper Dating Podcast. I’m Ken Page. I’m a psychotherapist, author of the book Deeper Dating, and the co-founder of DeeperDating.com, a new way for people to meet online that is respectful, warm, and inspiring. In every episode, I’m going to share with you the greatest tools that I know to help you find love and keep it flourishing, and heal your life in the process because the skills of dating are the skills of intimacy, and the skills of intimacy are the greatest skills of all for a happy and rich life. If you want to learn more about the deeper dating path to real intimacy, just go to DeeperDatingPodcast.com. If you sign up for my mailing list, you’ll get some free gifts and learn about how to use these ideas to transform your search for intimacy, and you’ll find complete transcripts of every episode as well. I also just want to say that everything I share in this podcast is educational in nature. It’s not medical or psychiatric advice. Finally, I want to say that if you like what you’re learning here, it would be a wonderful gift if you could subscribe, leave a review on iTunes, and that would be much appreciated. Now, let’s jump in.

 

Last Episode Recap

Let me begin by recapping what we talked about in the last episode because this is a two-part series. In the last episode, I talked about our scripts that we carry with us in our search for love. They’re deep and profound and that we act out again and again. One of these, I call the myth of lost love, which is the story that we tell ourselves about why we haven’t been loved right, what it says about the world, and what we need to do about it? These scripts are deep and profound things. They truly shape our behavior in amazing ways, and we can change these scripts by bringing wisdom into our search for love. I want to just start by recapping what the myth of lost love is, what we talked about in the last episode. In this episode, we’re going to be talking about how we can deconstruct that myth, and how we can rewire and build a story that makes more sense, that holds us in a better way, that allows us to make better and wiser choices, that allows more freedom and more intimacy. Let me start by just explaining this concept of the myth of lost love. In the ways that we were not seen and the ways that we were not loved right, and we’re human beings in a world filled with pain, suffering, and defense, and so none of us were loved perfectly right. Also, all of us have qualities that are both genius qualities but also deeply challenging to us and to the world. They’re the source of our greatness, but they are also the source of so much struggle and dilemma, because we have to grow into the power, the size, the gentleness, the intensity of these gifts, and whatever they are. Of course, our parents and our caregivers have also been wounded, and have not been able to see us and meet us properly in important ways, no matter how much they loved us. Admitting how you push love away is an act of greatness.CLICK TO TWEETOf course, the world has hurt us in our dating lives and our romantic lives. I think almost all of us have been hurt and often profoundly hurt, so we create this myth of lost love that originates in our childhood that grows and develops in our life and our dating life. It has three parts to it. The first part is it gives us an explanation of what the world is, like the world is a place where I can’t trust, or the world is a place where I am generous again and again, and keep being taken advantage of. The world is a place where this particular quality of mine has never really been seen or cherished and hence, has never felt safe. These are deep down stories that we tell ourselves about what the world is, and really how the world is going to treat us, and particularly, how the world is going to treat us if we show our deepest authentic self. That’s the first part of the myth. I’m doing this briefly because it’s what we talked about in the last episode. The second part of the myth is, what’s wrong with us? When a child is not treated right, they always think, “What’s wrong with me? How did I do this? How did I create this?” Often, we’re told directly or in subtler ways that it is our fault. We learn these deep down messages that way down in our psyche we translate into, “This is what’s wrong with me that I am not loved, seen, honored, or respected, etc.” The third part of the myth is, what do we need to do to protect ourselves so that we are not hurt this way again? So that we can avoid that pain and still find love. Often, these are kind of Byzantine complicated patterns that we create, that end up being self-sabotaging, and they get played out again and again. These are our myths of lost love.

  Based on these myths, we act out stories again and again. These myths, to some huge degree, determine who we’re crazy attracted to, who we’re not interested in, because a part of our being is seeking resolution to the pain of that myth, but does it based on the stories that come out of that myth, so a repetition happens again and again. How do we change this script that is so deeply embedded, so habitual, so reasonable to our inner child, the way that we’ve protected ourselves? It’s so embedded. How do we change that script? That’s kind of what I have devoted so much of my life work to figuring out how to do, and that includes my own personal work and journey. I’m excited to share some ideas on that, but the first thing that I want to say is something that I say all the time. That is that the research shows that if you’re trying to change a deeply embedded habit, two things that you need are some kind of template for a different way of being that feels to you like it has wisdom and solidity, and that you can really believe in. The second thing is a community of support, even if it’s just one person. Some kind of community of support where you can fail, think, rewire, pick yourself up, try something new, and unwire, dewire, and rewire again and again in the presence of a compassionate, somewhat objective, more spacious person who can help us not ram ourselves back into the same way of trying that we habitually do again and again. Don’t try to do that alone. In all of my classes, in all of my courses, and in my book too, I have people find a learning partner. Even on DeeperDating.com, when you fill out a profile, you can check whether or not you want a learning partner, and then you can search for people who are looking for learning partners. Please do this, give this gift to yourself in changing your script, not thinking that you can do it alone, no matter how smart you are, and no matter how self-disciplined you are, because this is a deeper process. It’s another dimension than just your smarts or your willpower. People who need to protect their soul, heart, peace, and safety don't use fighting as a solution.CLICK TO TWEET

Deconstruction And Rewiring

That said, I want to talk about the deconstruction and the rewiring around the three parts of this myth that we talked about. The first one that we talked about was understanding of what the world is and how the world will treat you when you’re authentic, when you’re vulnerable, when you need, when you’re extra fierce, when you’re extra tender, whatever those most important parts of you are. Out of our picture of what the world is and how we will be treated, we develop attachment styles. Some of the attachment styles that we develop, some of the ways that we develop are as follows. Tell me if any of them or you can tell me if you do the Ask Ken thing, but otherwise, think for yourself about which of these feel like they’re true for you. Here’s a really interesting one that I’m going to start with. I guess this is what it’s like. It’s like you’re in a burning building and you can only take out one thing. In a difficult life, we choose the things that we most need for survival. If what we most need is a sense of freedom, we have to often cut the cords to dependence. If what we most need is interconnectedness, we have to cut the cords to being radically authentic and we’ll have to people please. Each of us makes hard choices of what we’re going to take out of the burning building, and it’s the thing we need the most. One thing that I’ve noticed in my work is that people who have a deep connection to goodness need the world to be a good place, need to see goodness in the world. One way that they survive is a kind of enforced naivete, where they won’t see the reality of how selfish people can be, of how unkind people can be, not everyone but some people, how ethicless some people can be, and how abusive.

  To protect the sense of the world’s goodness, some people need to hold a naivete, which gets them in trouble again and again because they don’t necessarily see the reality of how people can behave. Some of us who have been told that we don’t have a right to have a voice, who have been hurt in the place of our dignity, autonomy, sovereignty, or many other things like that, hold a quality of defensiveness. Those of us that believe that the world is going to cut us down, that the world is going to hurt us, that the world is going to squash us, that if we are weak, if we are not strong, if we don’t fight back regularly and even preemptively, we’re going to be wounded and hurt. Those of us who have that have a quality of defensiveness or anger that we then use to protect ourselves against a world that’s hostile. Some of us who need to protect our soul, our heart, our peace, our safety don’t use fighting as a solution. We use retreat. We pull back and we become avoidant. Some of us who deeply believe that we might be betrayed, but deeply need connection, those of us who need connection in very deep ways, we all do, but some people are wired so that’s the thing they have to take out of the building, the one thing they need the most, and have this belief that we will be abandoned or not seen or dropped. We have a more insecure attachment style. These are just some examples and there are so many more, but they’re examples of, first of all, what’s the thing that we tell ourselves? You could think about this for a moment now. What are the myths that you’ve told yourself about how the world is an unsafe place, and just to reiterate that these myths are in a way seen from a child’s mind, but they have real reality not only in your experience but about what the world actually can be like? Those with a deep connection to goodness can often tend to become naïve.CLICK TO TWEET

Core Gifts

Now, I want to talk about the second part. The second part is what we tell ourselves is wrong with us, that we have created this pain or this problem, or that we have invited it or allowed it. That is the human tendency, is to blame ourselves. This is a really rich one and connects to our core gifts. There’s a lot of complexity, a lot of richness here that I talk about in greater depth in my book, and in many podcast episodes where I speak about core gifts. I’m just going to say briefly that the amazing thing here, the incredible thing here is that the qualities that we decide are the reason that people don’t love us, are almost always connected to our deepest gifts, which I call our core gifts. Those are the parts of us that have a quality of depth, intensity, sensitivity, or differentness that people don’t normally easily know how to handle, including us. They’re the deepest richest parts of us. They are our greatest beauty, and the more we align with those parts and honor them, and kind of live like artists in the presence of those qualities, like a deep sensitivity, a truth-telling, a hunger for accomplishment, achievement or creativity, a passion, an intensity, a tenderness, a humility, a generosity that runs so deep that it’s gotten us in trouble. These are the holy parts of us. These are the powerful parts of us, and the simple, strange question of, what have we told ourselves is wrong with us? Whatever those qualities are, are almost definitely intimately connected with our greatest gifts. If we don’t know how to embrace those qualities, we will be sexually and romantically attracted to people who step on them, deny them, ignore them, or don’t at all understand or appreciate them. The deep journey here and the gift of finding out our answer to that question, and you could take a moment now and pause and think about this. What do you tell yourself are the flaws in you that people just can’t love or betray you or let you down because of, or are too much, or maybe are not strong enough? Those are often the two things. We think we’re too much or we think we’re not enough. Around each of those points, there is a depth of being that’s so big, that maybe the world hasn’t known how to handle it, and we haven’t known how to handle it. Those are our core gifts. The journey here is to name those gifts. To come to understand them like we would understand a child that we have, who is brilliant and gifted, and also struggling with the weight of those gifts. There’s a lot of compassion that we need to hold. Also, a lot of treasuring and renaming again and again of the worth of these gifts. When we do this, we form into a self that can really live in an extraordinary way in the world. Over time, we find as we do this, as we name these gifts, is that when we’re dating, when we’re in relationships, we will notice when those gifts are not being seen. We’ll notice when those gifts are being stepped on or taken advantage of or abused, and we’ll say, “This feels horrible, no.” Instead of doing our old methods of convincing ourselves that we have to change, or convincing ourselves that the world is just this way, and this is all we can expect, we will instead begin to say, “This is not a place where I can feel really at home. I need to do something about that.” When we do that, our search for love changes, and our life changes. That is why this is really a kind of almost holy journey because it’s a journey to come back to those most deeply authentic, passionate, tender and sacred parts of ourselves that really as we do, our mission in life becomes clearer, and our capacity to love in a wiser way and choose in a wiser way also develops. That’s the second piece of how we blame ourselves, which can lead us to seeing what our deepest gifts are. The third one is then, what are the defense mechanisms that we create? What are the structures? What are the flight patterns from intimacy? What are the things that we do to look for love based on that myth? How do we behave when we believe this is what the world is? How do we behave when we feel shame around some of our deepest core gifts? What are the things that we do? What is the choreography of our behavior around those wounds? This is an incredibly rich and complex question, but I think I could just ask this in a way that you could think about briefly and just see what pops up. What are your ways of unconsciously, or maybe even consciously, pushing love away? What are the patterns that are yours by which you push love away even though you’re looking for it? You can take a minute, you can pause and think about it, but I want to say, I think it behooves all of us to become a student of our fear of intimacy and to really know the ways that we do this because we all do. I think that that is an act of greatness. It is to be able to swallow and admit, “These are the ways I push love away. This is the choreography of how I protect myself in ways that maybe aren’t the wisest, but they are the best I have had, and this is what I could consider doing differently.” I think that’s an act of greatness and humility. I think that the bang for your buck that you get in your intimacy journey when you tackle these things is absolutely huge. Each one of these things that we’ve talked about, your search for love and your intimacy life, will change profoundly as you embrace these pieces. You can see why this path is really a path to your own greatness, a path to the deepest parts of you, and God knows love is one of the deepest parts of all of us. Thank you so much for listening. I encourage you to think about all of these things and explore them further. I wish you blessings in your deep, profound, precious, and important learning journey around your search for love. I look forward to speaking with you in the next episode.

Table of Contents

• Myth Of Lost Love
• The Story We Tell Ourselves As Children
• Why We Deserve Punishment
• How To Protect And Defend Ourselves

How To Discover Your Personal “Myth Of Lost Love”

Understanding Your Core Beliefs About Romantic Love

In this episode of the Deeper Dating, you will discover your myth of lost love, the story that you crafted to help you understand your relationship to love and to the world. Stay tuned to this episode of the Deeper Dating Podcast. — Hello, everybody and welcome to the Deeper Dating Podcast. I’m Ken Page. I’m a psychotherapist, the author of the book, Deeper Dating, and the Cofounder of DeeperDating.com, a site where single people can meet based on the principles of dignity, respect, kindness and inspiration. Today, I’m going to talk about the myth of lost love, which are the inner stories that we tell ourselves, that shape the entire way we approach our romantic lives. You’ll learn about what your myth of lost love is. Every week, I’m going to share with you the greatest tools that I know to help you find love and keep it flourishing, and heal your life in the process because the skills of dating are the skills of intimacy, and the skills of intimacy are the skills of life. If you want to learn more about the deeper dating path to real intimacy, just go to DeeperDatingPodcast.com. If you sign up for my mailing list, you’ll get free gifts. You’ll also have access there to all of the transcripts of all of my episodes. I also want to say that everything I share in this podcast is educational in nature. It’s not medical or psychiatric advice. Finally, if you like what you’re hearing and learning here, it would be a wonderful gift if you could subscribe and even review this podcast. That’s a tremendous thing. The reviews that people have given have just been so beautiful and I’m really appreciative. Let’s jump in.

Myth Of Lost Love

Today, I’m going to be talking about what I call the myth of lost love, which is the deep story that we tell ourselves about who we are, who the world is, and how we need to behave in order to protect ourselves, and be loved. I call it a myth because it has an ancient depth. It touches our heartstrings in a very deep way. There are universal themes, but it’s also very personal. Like a myth, it shapes the way we approach our lives, and in this case, our romantic lives and our entire intimacy life. What we’re going to do in this episode is I’m going to talk about the different components of the myth of lost love. I’m going to ask you some questions as we go, and you can just quickly think of what your response is. By the end of this episode, you will have a much richer understanding of your myth of lost love and how it shapes your romantic life, and also where it came from. There’s a lot of rich stuff here. You’re also going to be learning how your myth of lost love points to you, what your deepest core gifts are that you have not yet been able to embrace. It’s exciting and profound stuff. This is going to be a two-part episode. In the second episode, we’ll be talking about how we can change the story of our myth of lost love. To have it finally become a story that works and heals us, and adds to the love in our life instead of ultimately subtracting from it, and that includes self-love. In this episode, we’re going to talk about what the myth of lost love is. You’re going to identify yours, and in that, you will get glimpses of your deepest core gifts, which lie at the heart of your entire intimacy journey. The act of suppressing hidden parts of us is an act of quiet violence against our deepest being.CLICK TO TWEET

The Story We Tell Ourselves As Children

Each one of us has created this myth of lost love, which is a life-defining story that we use to explain why we were not loved the way we needed to be when we were children, why we were not loved the way we needed to be by our romantic partners, and what we can do to repair that pain or protect ourselves from experiencing it again. This myth comes alive whenever we’re in a relationship that really matters to us, and it can stir us down to our very core. I’m going to share a story, and that story is going to illustrate some of the different points of the myth of lost love.

Why We Deserve Punishment

The first dynamic in the myth of lost love that we create is the story we tell ourselves as children, about the ways in which the world is an unsafe and unloving place. Debbie’s story. Debbie’s dad divorced her mother when Debbie was about seven years old. She was a single parent with four older boys, and one very sensitive little girl to raise. Her mom just didn’t have the time or the energy for her. She seemed angry a lot of the time. Debbie’s many attempts to show love to her mother were sometimes returned, but often they were rebuffed or ignored completely. Debbie really only remembered a few times when her mother showed her real affection. Sometimes, her mom would actually humiliate her when Debbie showed her need, her longing for connection, her soft side. As a result, Debbie ended up experiencing the world as a place that had an essential coldness, and where the warmth of real love was mostly unattainable. She developed a myth of lost love to explain why her mother’s love was being denied to her. She came to the conclusion that the world was a cold place that rewarded need and vulnerability with humiliation, and rewarded the lack of need and the lack of vulnerability with success. That’s the first part of how we come to see and understand the world based on our experiences. You might want to take a minute to think about that. We’re going to get to this one more deeply in a moment, but what are the parts of you that you felt were not treasured or honored at home, in your deep love relationships, or in the world in general? What did that teach you or tell you? What did you decide about the world because of that? Some people decide that the world is a cold place and shut down in particular ways, and protect themselves because they hold onto a sense of reality. Other people, for very different reasons, can experience abuse, neglect and those same things. What they need to hold on to is a sense of goodness of the world. Even if it’s a losery, those people approach the world with a kind of naiveté. Not believing that someone would hurt them even if their gut instincts are this person isn’t safe. These are just some of the ways that we create a myth. That second myth is a myth of, “If I’m good enough, if I’m kind enough, if I’m loving enough, this other person will be different.” My mom is a Holocaust survivor. She had that. Her thing when she was eight years old was, “If the Nazis could see my goodness, they would never hurt me.” There is cruelty, unkindness, and vast amounts of pain and suffering in the world. Each of us develops a story.

  Second, the myth of lost love explains why we deserve this punishment. On one hand, we believe something about the world. On the other hand, deep down, we believe something about us. That’s what kids do. They make it all about themselves. That’s what children do. As a kid, Debbie had no way to know that her mom was the one with the big issue here. She loved her, and so she explained her mom’s coldness in a way that made sense to her, “It’s my fault. I’m unlovable.” What it came down to for Debbie was, “I need too much and people hate that.” She grew up feeling that somehow, she was the reason that she couldn’t find real love. Our myth of lost love continues this path of damage, our negative myth, by telling us exactly what makes us unworthy of love. We do that to ourselves in such crippling terms. We hone in on our most human traits. Our most vulnerable traits, our traits of need, our traits that were shamed or ignored, or our traits that are somehow immature, not refined, or not socially skilled. We blame ourselves and tell ourselves that those are the reasons why we lose love. It taught Debbie that vulnerability and emotional intensity were humiliating traits that made her unlovable, in a world that tended to step on those parts of her, and of ourselves. Here’s another really rich question. What are the parts of you that somewhere deep down inside, you believe if you really show them to a person, you’re deeply intimate with, they’re going to be turned off? They’re going to turn away from you. Somehow, they’re going to betray you. Somehow, they’re going to pull the rug out from under you. Somehow, they’re going to profoundly disappoint you, or you with these traits, you are so profoundly going to disappoint them, that they’re not going to be available to you. Now, this is a rich and amazing question for a lot of reasons, which I’ll talk about in a minute, but take a minute. You could even pause the recording if you want just to think about, what are those qualities that you tell yourself “This is the reason why people don’t end up being attracted to me romantically, sexually, or why the world doesn’t want to hear my message, or hear my creativity, or appreciate or relish my gifts.”? Take a minute just to think about that. I have lots to say about this. The big thing that I want to say is that these qualities, the ones you just listed, and I’m not talking about events in your life that you feel, “I’m ashamed of this. I’m embarrassed by this.” I’m not talking about events. I’m talking about parts of your being, parts of your nature. Some examples would be, a deep longing for love, a need to depend on people, and be able to really deeply lean on them. A passion for truth, an intense sensitivity, a deep quality of humility, a fiercely passionate kind of fiery attribute to your nature, a truth-telling. These are just some examples. Whatever it is for you, these are core gifts. Meaning they are parts of you that can never be amputated. Ultimately, if you try to airbrush them or people-please them away, you will pay because they’re parts of your soul. The act of suppressing those parts is an act of quiet violence against our deepest being. This is such an amazing thing, but the things we tell ourselves are the reasons why people can’t love us. This is the therapy journey that, as a therapist, I take people on, that, is a very extended process in many cases to have the depth of realization come alive about this. Those qualities that we’re most ashamed of are qualities that are connected to our deepest core gifts, and end up being our saviors in life and in love when we claim them and embrace them. When we don’t, we end up sexually and romantically attracted to people who also can’t treasure those parts of us. Treasure the hidden parts of ourselves, name them, identify them, and look for people who in essential ways, love those parts.CLICK TO TWEETNow, are those parts of us demanding? Yes. They’re like being a genius. Genius demands a lot of fuel. It demands a lot of understanding. It demands a lot of spaciousness, a lot of creativity, a lot of challenge, and a lot of work. These qualities demand that of us. They demand it of the people who love us, and the people who love us are often not willing to do that work, which is why our salvation comes from finding the people who treasure those very aspects of us. In a nutshell, I think that’s the greatest secret of self-love and romantic love.

How To Protect And Defend Ourselves

The third part of the myth of lost love is that it tells us how to protect and defend ourselves in an unsafe world. As a kid, Debbie had to learn how to be quiet in the face of her mom’s anger. She had to be the best little girl in the world. The anger that took root in Debbie as a child came into full bloom in Debbie as an adult. She still wanted to be the best girl in the world, but she vowed not to be humiliated again. Every time she felt vulnerable, even if she felt afraid of being unloved, in other words, she felt vulnerable and she didn’t express it. She was afraid that if she did, she would be hurt. She would mount a kind of preemptive strike. She would have a sudden kind of prickliness or over the top anger, and it would undermine and destroy each new budding relationship for her. Now, there’s a few pieces here. There is her need, her vulnerability, and her soft heart. There is the ferocity of her self-protection and pride. All of which are cherished, precious, and essential parts of us, and Debbie in this case. Here is the thing that is also so rich and powerful. It’s that because these core gifts are so demanding, and because they get us in trouble, we try to leave them behind so we could be normal and like everyone else, and be loved and be whatever it is that we think we need to be, which never works and bites us in the butt in an essential, profound, and ongoing way, but because we leave these parts of us behind, they don’t grow up. There’s a quality of immaturity that is often stuck with them. Part of the work of reclaiming these gifts is not just thinking, “I have these fabulous gifts, and anyone who doesn’t get them in whatever form they’re in, just doesn’t love me.” That’s kind of an exaggeration because we need to teach these gifts how to grow up in the world, how to have legs, how to express themselves with more courage, with more kindness, and with more integration. That comes with the first step, that is unequivocally to treasure these parts of ourselves, to name them, to identify them, and to look for people who in an essential way, love those parts of us, but then the work does become to help those parts of ourselves grow up, and become more mature, and be able to stand as entities, as part of our mission in the world.

  Until we do that, our myth of lost love instructs us in how to protect and defend ourselves in an unsafe world. Even though we know that those parts of Debbie were core gifts, and that her efforts to suppress them were not going to work, she didn’t know that at the time that these were central parts of her being. She knew she hadn’t found the love that she wanted, and that the life she had dreamed of was passing her by. She didn’t know what to do about it. In therapy, she began to name those core gifts. She discovered that there was a really important similarity with almost all her past boyfriends. None of them were comfortable with her vulnerability or with their own vulnerability. In fact, they all made her feel ashamed of it. Now with that, she had a blueprint behind her, what I call attractions of deprivation. She saw that again and again, the people she was most wildly attracted to were the people in front of whom she felt like she needed to hide these parts of herself to get them to really love her and commit, but it never worked. She couldn’t hide them well enough so she felt like a failure, and they didn’t love her fully or fully enough. That same pattern happened again and again. She began to realize that the pain she had felt in past relationships was the pain of a gift that had never been loved into fullness. She had lost all this time trying to get people to accept parts of her that she didn’t acceptm and they were not the kind of people who could accept and treasure. At this point, her powerful will and her pride lined up behind a new goal. That that was the only kind of man that she would settle for. She began to date and surround herself with people who, in an essential way, valued her vulnerability, and were not terrified by her need. These were hallmarks and foundations of changing her life, and being able to find and nourish and keep love. Take a minute to think about what your ways are to protect yourself in this world. It might be avoidance of deeper intimacy. It might be choosing unavailable people. What are the ways that you have done this? In our next episode, we’re going to talk about how to change our myth of lost love, but with the information you have now, you can begin to think about the treasured parts of you that you felt like you had to neglect, ignore or airbrush in order to find love, which in fact are the keys to self-love and the creation of love in our lives. Thank you so much for listening, and I look forward to seeing you on the next episode of the Deeper Dating Podcast.

Table of Contents

• Moving Past The Regret And Confusion
• Biologically Incompatible
• Emotional Sobriety
• Not Almost Man

Deeper Dating Q&A: Expert Advice For All Your Questions About Love, Dating And Sex

What Do You Do When It’s Almost Working…But Almost Is Still Not Enough

Welcome to the Deeper Dating Q&A, where I’m going to answer your most pressing personal questions about love, sex and intimacy, in such a way that you can apply these insights to the particulars of your own love life, so you’re going to leave this episode with new possibilities and hopefully, some important revelations about your own relationships. Stay tuned to the Deeper Dating Podcast. — Hello, everybody and welcome to the Deeper Dating Podcast. I’m Ken Page and I’m a psychotherapist. I’m the author of the book Deeper Dating and the Cofounder of DeeperDating.com, a new online experience where people can meet in ways that are inspiring, respectful, and fun. Today, I’m going to be answering your questions about your relationship issues. This week and every week when I have an episode, I’m going to share the greatest tools that I know to help you find love and keep it flourishing and heal your life in the process because the true skills of dating are the deep skills of intimacy. Those are the greatest building blocks of all for a happy, rich, and meaningful life. If you want to learn more about the deeper dating path to real intimacy, just go to DeeperDatingPodcast.com. You’ll find transcripts of every episode. If you sign up for my mailing list, you’ll get lots of free resources and learn a lot more about how to use these ideas to transform your own intimacy journey. I also want to say that everything I share in this podcast is educational in nature. It’s not medical or psychiatric advice or treatment, and if you’re experiencing any serious psychological symptoms, please seek professional help. Finally, if you like what you’re learning here, it would be an amazing thank you if you subscribed and left me a review. Thank you so much for that and let’s dive in. — I’m going to need to do a few of these Q&As closer together, especially now that I’m doing an episode every two weeks for the time being, because there are many amazing questions that I got that I want to be able to answer. I’m only able to answer some of them at a time. Today, I’m going to talk about four questions that I got that all have a really similar theme. That theme is meeting someone who really feels like an attraction of inspiration, which is someone who you’re attracted to not because of their unavailability, not because of their mixed messages, not because of the chaos and the craziness, but because of their goodness, their decency, their authenticity and their availability, and a feeling of a mutual bond that just has a quality of goodness, solidity and trustability, which is a huge issue. All of these stories, all of these questions come from people who have found relationships like that, and are now struggling with certain issues that have come up.

Moving Past The Regret And Confusion

One person said to me that she really appreciates my work, which I really appreciate hearing, and that after reading my book and doing this work, she met her husband who is a truly wonderful guy. All of the qualities of inspiration that I mentioned and that I write about, she felt like were really, really there. It still feels like those qualities were really there, but she needed time and space, and he pushed it too fast. That left her not feeling safe. He was very uncomfortable and didn’t feel safe with the unknowing space. He really pushed things fast, and she went along with that feeling, kind of horrible, even though he was such a great guy. She said the engagement was horrible for that reason. She felt anxious, she felt pushed, she felt unsafe, but they got married. The best antidote to old hypnosis is a current relationship with reality.CLICK TO TWEETAlthough he was a wonderful person and they had a relationship that was good in so many ways, in this essential way, it wasn’t. She never felt safe. She never was able to get over the fact that she felt pushed into getting married too soon. They did couples therapy. At a certain point, then he gave up and he said, “I can never be who you want me to be.” He gave up and they separated. They have been kind since that separation. They have been decent, but she is left feeling deeply regretful and wondering. She asked, “Was I too much of a perfectionist? My soul didn’t feel safe, but how do I move past the regret and the confusion that I feel now that I’ve lost him, and the relationship is over? I lost him because he felt like I never really was able to fully love him or accept him or embrace the relationship.” This is so poignant. I want to say first something that I say to people a lot. I want to congratulate you and acknowledge your shift that you chose someone with such qualities of inspiration. It’s a huge deal. It is a shift. It means everything, even if this relationship didn’t work. That said, if you’re feeling such deep regret and confusion, and I want to say this to anybody who has lost or ended a relationship that felt like an attraction of inspiration. When there was a deep sense of safety and awareness of that person’s goodness, and there was potential, and there was attraction where you left or it didn’t end up working out, or you couldn’t embrace it, and you’re feeling deep regret and confusion, you might want to explore what was going on there. You might want to explore the possibility of trying again. I think that if we’re not sure, it’s worth it. We tell ourselves we need to move past a relationship, but some people are very good at knowing when they need to move past their relationship. They still feel, in a particular case, this regret and confusion. What I would say is there was a wound spot hit by the two of you, where he could not give you enough space. What that created for you was untenable. You gave yourself up in a way by saying, “Yes.” That resentment when we give ourselves up can be so deep and so profound. I do think if you want, it would be worth it. No matter what, it is worth exploring the giving up of your own pacing because your pacing is precious, and it’s central. Just like with sex and intimacy, we have to honor that pacing, even if it’s hard for the other person. Something to look at is where you gave up your boundaries. That’s something for you to look at no matter what. I would say if there’s more discussion to be had with him, have it. If there’s another chance that seems reasonable and possible, you might want to try for that. Even if it doesn’t work, you will be clearer after doing that. If someone is not abusive, it’s a good relationship, and you’re still not sure – there’s no addiction, there’s no untreated mental illness, there’s goodness, there’s decency, and you’re not sure, you might want to try again. You might want to explore the possibility of trying again. I don’t know about you, but I know a number of people who have tried again and had it work. I know a number of people who have tried again and had it not work but got clearer. In the case of an essentially good relationship, if you feel drawn to go back, you might want to consider doing that. I did a whole podcast episode on this. I also do think that at the end of a relationship like that, where there was at least a big amount of inspiration, rightness and trust, it’s worth it to think, “What did I learn? How might there have been my fear of intimacy that played a role in this? What will I know next time? What will I do differently next time?” That’s something you might want to think about even now. Was there an attraction of inspiration that you weren’t able to sustain? What are your reflections and what you would have done differently? You might want to take a minute to think about that right now. You can even pause the recording if you like.

 

Biologically Incompatible

Someone else asked, “Are there people who are just biologically not compatible?” She says, “With my boyfriend, from the very beginning, I had issues with his breath and smell.” She said, “At this point, I hate his smell. Is this the wave of distancing?” For those of you who don’t know, that’s when you meet someone and they’re really available, really decent and really trustable. The excitement feels like it’s not there and you just want to flee. The reason is often a deep fear of availability. I’ve spoken about this and what to do about it a lot in previous podcasts. Anyway, she said, “I am just now completely repulsed by his smell. I don’t want to have sex. He’s a wonderful person and I’m afraid to go deeper. Is this a biological incompatibility? What do I do?” This is a really rich question. Of course, I’m going to start with the simplest part here. If someone’s breath is bad, that probably means that they have gum decay or tooth decay. That is something that’s addressable that you have every right in the world to ask them to address. It’s hard to do, but you really do deserve this. If they have body odor of any sort, it’s the same thing – you have a right to ask that they take care of that. It’s important to do that, but that might not be this. Although the breath thing does sound like it might be that. I did a little bit of research into this and found out some very fascinating things. One piece of this is that we have a sequence of more than a hundred immune system genes known as MHC, Major Histocompatibility Complex. What science has discovered is that we are most attracted to the smell of people who are immunologically dissimilar. In other words, their MHC profile is different than ours. In cases where the MHC profile is very similar, there’s going to be less attraction to the person’s smell and maybe less attraction to the person as a whole. Interestingly, there’s also more chance of immunologically healthier offspring between partners whose MHC complex is dissimilar. People whose MHC complex is more similar are more likely to have children who are less disease resistant. Interestingly too, the only time that that awareness is not there fully for women is when they’re on birth control. When they’re on birth control pills, supposedly their ability to get the scent dissatisfaction that they experienced with people whose MHC is different than theirs. They don’t have that ability if they’re on birth control pills. That’s an interesting thing too. There are also other factors, like for example, trauma. When we have trauma memories, when we have trauma experiences, certain kinds of smells can trigger us, or fears can come up and they can manifest themselves in ways like a repulsion towards someone’s smell. This is a concept of the wave. Often, when we meet someone who is available and we become afraid, we start feeling repulsed by them. This is something that is also worth exploring. This is so multifactorial. Please don’t think that we are just so much victims of biology in our MHC complexes because we have to look, could it be a fear of intimacy? The last thing that I would say is if you have looked at these issues, if you don’t think it’s the wave, if you have this person address hygiene issues and you know that it’s not necessarily an illness related issue or a hygiene-related issue, or a gum disease-related issue, and you just cannot get past their smell, and this goes on, you do need to not torture yourself and just accept that that’s the way things are. I also want to say something else too, that there may be ways that you can be with the person that are very sexy and very hot that somehow bypass some of the smell issues. There might be parts of their body that you don’t like to smell and other parts that you don’t feel that way. If this is a really special relationship, once again, I say, look into all those possibilities. Ultimately, you can’t be with someone who you just feel repulsed by their smell, and some of the other factors that we mentioned. Deeper love begins by the way you handle the things your intuition says are off.CLICK TO TWEET

Emotional Sobriety

Someone else said that she’s done a lot of recovery work around emotional sobriety. She had parents who were abused and addicted. She said she’s proud of the work that she’s done because she’s lost her taste for attractions of deprivation, which I celebrate hearing. She doesn’t have any attractions of deprivation anymore. That doesn’t happen for her in her romantic life. She said she’s two months in with a kind and wonderful guy, and she feels now it’s the next step. It’s not being with someone who was an attraction of deprivation and going through all of the roller coaster of that. This is something different. She’s with a kind and wonderful guy. She feels like she doesn’t have it in her to believe that she is loved. She said that the excitement of chaos also isn’t there. I want to say something about this, and I’m wondering if any of you relate to this. Have you ever been in a situation where you’ve been with someone who loved you, and was available and was present, and you couldn’t take it in? You couldn’t really believe it. I want to say a few things about that. The biggest thing that I want to say is, on some level, that’s okay. That is human. For those of us, and I include myself in this, who have had a particular kind of trauma in life, there’s some way that some parts of us believe in the love, and other parts just can’t. It’s like putting two positive ends of a magnet together and they can’t connect. I know that I have parts of me to this day, thirteen years into the relationship with my husband, where I cannot believe in his love for me, even though it’s there and it’s present, so I create bypasses. Those bypasses are all the ways that my body knows I’m loved, that I know that my nervous system knows that I’m safe, and I’m treasured because of his behaviors, because of all the ways that my nervous system senses what my mind can’t always believe. I trust those pathways and I follow them. Also, I talk about it. When I hit these junctures where it’s hard for me to believe in his love for me, I talk about it. In fact, I’ll share that the night before we got married, I took a walk with him to the beach and I said, “I love you. I know you love me, but some part of me doesn’t believe it. We’re getting married tomorrow and some part of me is still too afraid to believe it.” It was great that I said that and he made space for it. I just want to make space for the parts of all of us, where we don’t believe yet that we’re loved, where we can’t take it in so that we can create pockets, where at those times we don’t ride on our cognition. We ride more maybe on our nervous system where we essentially feel safe, or maybe we just take our partner’s hand and be quiet together. A therapist said to me something so wise once, and I love it. It’s been so useful to me as a therapist. She said, “The best antidote to an old hypnosis is a current relationship with reality.” If your old hypnosis is in the truth of not being loved, the truth of non-availability, the truth of abuse, by being with your partner in ways that don’t feel suffocating, that don’t push you and don’t pressure you, but let your nervous system and your heart, or maybe your skin, because touch helps so much, register and realize the care that is there for you. That helps us get past those cognitive places where we can’t get it or believe it, or those nervous system places where we can’t believe it, or those deep trauma places where we can’t believe it. We do not have to get rid of those, but what is good to do is to be able to hold them with cupped hands, with non-judgment, and to learn from them the language of how we get past them, how we hold them, how we stay connected, even when parts of us don’t feel connected. That’s just so much of the story of real intimacy that we don’t get taught. This listener also shared some feedback on a previous episode. The episode of the interview I did with Mike Moran where date rape was mentioned. She said that that was kind of upsetting for her to hear the words date rape, because date rape minimizes the fact that rape is rape, and the fact that it happened on a date doesn’t at all change the reality of rape. That phrase date rape is a very minimizing and disrespectful term. I want to thank you so much for that. I really appreciate that. It makes perfect sense and I learned something. Thanks for your bravery in sharing that. I wanted to share it with my listeners’ community and apologize for that and acknowledge that.

 

Not That Almost Man

The last question that I’m going to take, and there are so many more, and I will get to them as well as I can in the time that I have. This is a very poignant one. It’s someone who is talking about facing the end of a relationship. “After about three years of being mostly single,” she said in her words, “I met someone who was not that almost man, almost loving, almost available, almost kind, almost respectful. He was not an almost man.” In fact, they had visualized each other, and they shared with each other things that they wrote in their visualization process of qualities they’d want their partner to have that articulated the other person. These are two people who are deeply intuitive, and each had visualized the other. She said that, “It has been beautiful and I celebrate that. That is wonderful.” She said one month in, after a day of planning their future together, her partner who’s deeply intuitive said he needed to take a pause, and it’s been about a month now, because he somehow felt that there was something that was not right. He wanted time. He wanted to honor that he was certain that it was not fear, a kind of unconscious fear. He wanted to take the time in that month to honor himself and to explore what it was that didn’t feel right to his intuition. What she said is, “For me, I’m very intuitive too, and my intuition is saying, ‘Yes, this is good and this is right.’” One thing I want to say about intuition, and this is something I’ve also talked about in a previous podcast, is sometimes it’s hard to know what is intuition and what is fear. What is intuition and what is a need that doesn’t want to face reality? Those things that we think are intuition can be blindingly powerful, but when it’s an arena where a lot is at stake, we can’t always trust our intuition. I feel that very strongly. I think that that is true in early relationships. To the person who asked the question, it might be that your intuition is based on a kind of sensing something wrong too that frightens you that you don’t want to face. It may be that his intuition is exactly that. All I’m saying is that this is a point that it’s good to check in with the friends who know us and love us, and hear what they have to say, because they may say or this guy’s friends might say to him, “You have done this before and don’t mess this one up.” Maybe your friends might say to you something similar, or maybe your friends will say, “No, I get it. This really feels right between the two of you.” All I’m saying is when it comes to big decisions where there’s a heavy charge and especially situations where there’s been trauma, struggling or suffering around something that matters as much as a relationship, get help. Don’t trust that your intuition is your intuition. You might ultimately trust it but get those side-view mirrors going, where you can get focus from other people because you do, WE do have blind spots. Often, those blind spots feel so much like intuition. I am hoping that this guy is not taking a complete break from the relationship for a month. If he is, I think that’s a warning sign because the best antidote to an old hypnosis is through a current relationship with reality. His being with you is how he’s going to come to understand which pieces of this might be things that don’t feel safe, that might be just historical for him, which are pieces that feel true. If they are true, I want to say that as we progress in a relationship, we reach a point where there are deep flaws or off-nesses that we feel in our relationship. That is what’s supposed to happen. That is when deeper love begins by the way you handle the things that your intuition says are off. That’s the meat and the potatoes of the heart of intimacy. Not fleeing and going into a cave and thinking you’re going to work it out yourself, but working it out with support, with side-view mirrors, and in relationship with the other person. What I would want to say to this guy is, “Yes, your intuition probably is telling you something is off. Explore that, but don’t just explore it in your head, explore it in the relationship.” That’s what I would say to the two of you. I hope that that is something that can happen. I also want to say that I love these questions, because these questions reflect people who have lost their taste for unhealthy relationships and are now dealing with the challenges that come up in relationships that are basically good, even if those relationships don’t work. I just want to acknowledge that progress. I want to ask each one of you to think about what touched you in this episode. What related to your experience? Think about are there any pieces of wisdom in this, any insights that you feel you want to take and apply to your life that feel true to you? Take a minute and think about that. I want to thank you all. I look forward to seeing you in the next episode of the Deeper Dating Podcast. For those folks who are single, go to DeeperDating.com. It is a new place that we have created for thoughtful, caring, single people to meet. I look forward to speaking with you again soon. Blessings on your intimacy journey

• Studies On Swipe-Based Dating Apps
• Pushing Love Away While Looking For It
• Circuitries Of Attraction
• How To Do Swiping Differently

Swipe Circuitry: How Online Dating Trains Us To Stay Single

How To Stop Fleeing Love While You Seek It Online

Swipe circuitry is this incredibly seductive behavior pattern that’s sculpted by online dating, that actually leads us away from the love that we’re seeking. Stay tuned to this episode to learn more about what swipe circuitry is and how you can stop it. — Hello, everybody and welcome to the Deeper Dating Podcast. I’m Ken Page and I’m a psychotherapist, author of the book Deeper Dating, and the Cofounder of DeeperDating.com, a new way for single people to meet online that’s respectful, warm and inspiring. Today, I’m going to talk about what I call swipe circuitry, a behavior pattern in online dating that looks like it can lead us to love, but actually leads us away from it. Every episode, I’m going to share with you the greatest tools that I know to help you find love and keep it flourishing, and heal your life in the process because the real skills of dating are nothing more than the skills of intimacy. Those are the greatest skills of all for a happy life. If you want to learn more about the deeper dating path to real intimacy, just go to DeeperDatingPodcast.com. If you sign up for my mailing list, you’ll get free gifts and resources, and you’ll learn a lot more about how to use these ideas to transform your own intimacy journey. I also want to say that everything I share in this podcast is educational in nature. It’s not medical or psychiatric advice or treatment, and if you’re experiencing any serious psychological conditions, please seek professional help. Finally, if you like what you’re learning here, I would love it if you could subscribe on iTunes or elsewhere and leave me a review. Thank you so much for that and thanks for the amazing reviews that so many of you have left. Let’s jump in. We push love away while we're looking for it.CLICK TO TWEET—

Studies On Swipe-Based Dating Apps

Let me start out with some pretty amazing statistics. Research from the West Sydney University and the University of Sydney has directly linked the experience of swipe-based dating apps to higher rates of depression and psychological distress. In 2017, there was a study that linked the use of Tinder with negative self-esteem and body shame, but interestingly, not leading to any positive change in diet or eating habits. Another study showed that the app Grindr was way at the top of the apps that made people feel most unhappy. Seventy-seven percent of them admitted that it made them feel miserable. Tinder was up there too, but here is something interesting too, is that 70% of gay relationships began online. Clearly, there is good here. There is potential here. There is capacity here, but there are patterns that get sculpted by what I call swipe circuitry, that gets sculpted by dating apps that do swiping, and get sculpted by dating apps in general. Here’s another wild statistic. Less than 10% of matches in swipe apps are consummated with even a hello, because the users keep playing instead of messaging the matches that were already made. This is huge. This is deep and this is so symbolic of the incredible possibilities that exist in online dating, and the behaviors that get sculpted out of these apps that pull us away from really being able to make use of these incredible resources. Less than 10% even get a hello, and these are matches. These are matches that were made. I think that speaks to the gamifying of swipe apps and what happens to us.

Pushing Love Away While Looking For It

I’m going to talk about this a little more because it’s really interesting what happens to us. This is what it is, it’s the ways in which we push love away while we’re looking for it. I know for me, this is one of the most profound realizations that I had to have, was that in my desperate and ongoing and relentless search for a relationship, I was pushing love away. I was trusting numbers and I was trusting in getting in great shape. I was trusting meeting lots of people. I was trusting in all of those things, that because they have nothing to do with intimacy, ultimately failed me in my search for intimacy. Unavailability has a spice, a kind of umami, that is so lovely, so exciting, so delicious, and so compelling, and really feels like love.CLICK TO TWEETWhether you’re using swiping apps or not, whether you’re using online dating as a tool or not, I think these questions are very powerful. How in the ways that I’m searching for love might I be pushing love away? What are my metaphors for this concept of getting a match and 9 out of 10 times, not even responding? I’ll tell you what some of mine were that I’m clear on. One was consistently looking for people who were sexy, spicy, attractive, desirable, and did not get me or weren’t available. That was one way that I did that. Another way that I did that was, unconsciously, I fled the possibility of real intimacy with peers who could be available. I don’t know if it seemed more boring or claustrophobic or scary to me, but what I told myself is that those people were not exciting enough. That’s a really interesting point, I think. Unavailability has a spice, a kind of umami that is so lovely, so exciting, so delicious, and so compelling, and really feels like love. Not so much the experience of living in love, but the experience of longing for love and feeling like it’s almost in reach, but not quite. When you fall for someone who’s not available, there’s no fear, and that is such a relief. I know that was such a relief for me. Unavailable people, I had no fear. Now, if it was someone available, I would start to feel claustrophobic. I would start to lose interest. I would start to feel bored, and the glory of unavailable people was that I could just feel delightful, excitement, and attraction with none of that fear, because there’s a gulp that has to happen. There’s a kind of like a swallowing of discomfort when you go through the process of having someone who is a stranger, who’s available and interested, and wants to enter into your world, actually, go from being a stranger to being someone you deeply bond with is hard and it’s scary. Research shows that the degree to which we don’t yet really love ourselves or honor ourselves is the degree to which we’re going to be attracted to people who also don’t really love us, or honor us fully, or are not available. The degree to which we don’t love ourselves enough is the degree to which, when we meet people who are interested and available, we’re going to want to push them away. We’ll have a deep discomfort. This is what I call the wave of distancing. I’ve talked about it a lot. I think it’s one of the greatest, if not THE greatest saboteur of healthy new love. These apps that are constantly bringing you to the next, to the new, are very powerful for getting us over the discomfort that comes with availability. I think that’s a huge reason why so many of these matches aren’t consummated. It’s like, then I’ll have to talk to this person, then I might have to feel obligated to this person. I might not like this person. They might like me and I won’t like them, and that’s kind of exhausting, and you don’t want to have that happen, or maybe they’re kind of exciting and I’m scared because they might not like me.

 

Circuitries Of Attraction

I think something that is very important to understand, if we are trying to have a conscious and effective dating life and search for love, is this concept of circuitries of attraction. I think that all of us have different circuitries of attraction. The two big ones that I talk about a lot are attractions of deprivation and attractions of inspiration. Just to briefly describe those, I’ve spoken about them a lot in different episodes, an attraction of deprivation is where the sexiness, and the attraction, and the desire, at least in part, springs from the sense that someone is almost available, or is almost going to like us. They’re just somehow out of reach, and that is so sexy. It brings up such deep longing inside us, or they don’t fully accept us, or they accept us, but they don’t treasure us, or they miss our jokes and they miss our ideas, and they don’t get kind of our unique genius or our way of seeing the world. We feel like we are not seen or loved or cherished enough, but we almost are enough. We try to get that person to love us more fully, to get our jokes, to understand our unique kind of intelligence, to appreciate our beauty. You know, when you have to try that hard, it means that it’s not working. It’s hard to describe how sexy these attractions are and how they pull at us, and how they feel like love, but these are what I call attractions of deprivation. It’s a circuitry all of us have. It’s like that playing hard to get kind of thing activates that circuitry. So much of the men’s seduction techniques are based on triggering that circuitry in women. So much of women’s seduction techniques to get a man are based on not being too available and all those kinds of things. Lots more to say about that in another episode, but the research clearly shows that playing hard to get doesn’t work. We can talk about that more in other episodes. Anyway, those are attractions of deprivation, and how many years or months have we spent lost in those attractions? One of the things that happen in those attractions is that we are branded again and again with our feelings of insecurity. They’re branded more deeply into us. They prove the point that we’re not enough, but if we try harder, we might become enough, which translates into we are essentially just not enough. This is a powerful circuitry. It’s one that gets triggered easily, but for almost all of us, it is not our only circuitry. We have another circuitry, which I call attractions of inspiration. That’s when we’re attracted to somebody because of their goodness, their decency, their authenticity, qualities like creativity and originality, but the kind of good qualities, the qualities of decency, goodness, truth-telling, availability, and the kind of consistent, essential, liking and loving of us. Now, this is a different circuitry of attraction. When you fall for someone who's not available, there's no fear, and that is such a relief.CLICK TO TWEETHere’s a really interesting point. The people that kind of grab at you and excite you deeply and intensely from the beginning often do so because unconsciously, you recognize that they’re not going to love you the way that you want to be loved. That reminds you of ways in your life that you weren’t loved the way that you want to be loved, and that’s very compelling. With attractions of inspiration, that desperate, sexy edge is not there. There’s a sense of goodness. There’s a sense of growing care. There can be such deep, rich, wonderful, fabulous lust. I’m absolutely not saying that can’t be there, but it’s a skill that we need to develop to allow that to happen in an attraction of inspiration, because for many of us, we just want to get out of there. We want to flee.

How To Do Swiping Differently

Now, in the land of online dating, what this means is that the people that you swipe most quickly “yes” on, the people that you swipe right on most quickly, are the people who are your scratch-the-itch type in most cases. I’m going to talk about how to do this, how to do swiping differently, but assuming you just kind of go with the sculpted behavior that comes out of this, the people that you’ll swipe right on will often be those real scratch-the-itch types, and those are often attractions of deprivation. All of this happens unconsciously, but it happens. This is not always the case, but it’s often the case. You just recognize that tiny little smirk, maybe that drop of arrogance that’s there, that little bit of superiority that like, you don’t quite name yet, but there’s something sexy there. A distance, a pullback that just grabs you. I know all of these so well from my own experiences. You have to look differently for an attraction of inspiration. You need to look for inspiration. You need to look for the qualities of decency, stability, values that you love. You need to look for these things. At a certain point, in my intensives and my courses, there’s a certain point where people reach where they’ve kind of explored their attractions of deprivation, their attractions of inspiration, and they make a pledge, and the pledge is, “No more attractions of deprivation. No more. I won’t do that again. I’m going to close the door on that no matter how sexy it seems. I’m only going to pursue my attractions of inspiration, people with deep goodness, decency, integrity, and a growing sense of availability.”

  When you make that choice, you begin to shift your attraction circuitries. Your circuitry of attractions of inspiration grows, and is watered and fed, just like to a hammer, everything is a nail. The more you’re in this decision to only choose inspiration, the more you will notice inspiration. You’ll notice people you wouldn’t have noticed before. Often, when you’re in that circuitry, a funny thing happens. You start remembering people from your past who were attractions of inspiration that you’ve kind of forgotten about. They come back to the fore. I always say to people, “When you do this kind of work and you grow in these kinds of ways, when people pop up from your past in your mind, and you remember, “That person was good and decent. That was an attraction of inspiration and I wasn’t ready for it.” You can find out what those people are doing. They might be available. It might be a match. I think that’s always good to do. I’ve heard so many stories of people later just becoming friends with these people. When you’re swiping, you go into a different zone, you click into a different circuitry. Another interesting piece of research showed that college males often never ever use swiping apps even to hook up, much less to ever even speak or anything. They use it because it builds their self-esteem and it kind of helps them when they’re feeling bored. This is an amazing thing. Now, maybe you’re not using swiping apps. Maybe you’re not even dating online, but this is a very deep thing. What happens with these people who aren’t spicy because of their unavailability, cockiness, arrogance, mild disdain, or addictions? What happens with the people who aren’t those people but are real attractions of inspiration? What do you do with those people, because they just might not be quite as exciting at first. Do you ignore those people? Do you dismiss those people? Now, I am not saying that you should be with someone who’s intellectually boring to you, that you should not be with someone who’s not really attractive to you. Of course, you shouldn’t, but I promise you that there are people who are good and decent, who are deeply creative, who have great intellect, who are physically attractive to you and are going to be physically attracted to you. There’s quite a pool of people like that. Those are the people that you want to look for. You’re doing online dating, you’re doing swipe app dating, you’re not doing online dating, the kind of task becomes the same. It is to slow down, to move away from that kind of sped up circuitry, that kind of scratch-the-itch circuitry, because scratch-the-itch circuitry might lead to a hookup. It might lead to a bad relationship. You never know it might lead to a good relationship, but usually that kind of scratch-the-itch circuitry pulls you away from closeness and intimacy. The people that you swipe most quickly yes on are the people who are your scratch-the-itch type in most cases.CLICK TO TWEETWhat you want to do is to slow down enough, to allow yourself to not be stuck on the type of person that you always think you’re attracted to. Instead, slow down enough to feel into the quality of chemistry with someone. Often when you do that, it’s a hugely different experience than the experience of just being in your head and thinking, “This person is hot,” or “This person isn’t right for me.” When you slow down enough and you kind of go deep into your feeling state, you will feel different things than what your head is telling you. You want to know what those feelings are, because what those feelings are, are deeper chemistry, and you want to know what that deeper chemistry is. This is a really important thing. Take the time to find out, even when you want to flee, even when you want it to get away. This is a story that I often tell. My mentor, John McNeill, who was a brilliant author and theologian, who wrote the book, Taking a Chance on God and The Church and the Homosexual. He’s a hero of mine. I was telling him once in our spiritual direction sessions. I was telling him about somebody I was dating, and in his directing me, because I was saying that this guy was somewhat attractive. He was definitely not a red flag. No, but I wasn’t that interested. John said to me, “Keep dating him, because in time, either he’s going to become more beautiful to you or he’s not, and either way, you will know.” We do need to slow down. There are speed bumps with people who are attractions of inspiration. We get scared, but we don’t know it’s freer. In those cases, when that happens, what you want to do is slow down. You want to enjoy and almost fetishize, and appreciate the physical, emotional, and behavioral qualities about them that are sexy to you. You want to enjoy those, but with a little bit of space and a little bit of distance. You don’t necessarily want to force yourself to do sexual or intimate things that you don’t feel ready for. You keep a bit of space. You don’t flee and you don’t force yourself, and you allow this wave of distancing to pass, which it almost always will. When it passes, you will have a clearer sense of, “Is this person right for me, or are they not?” Now, we come to a wonderful question, and the question is, what ways do you use to push possible healthy love away while you’re looking for love? Just take a minute to think about that, because your answer is gold. It might be hard to swallow and a little humbling, but it is gold. If you can take that and begin to shift it, it’s just such an important piece of knowledge. I can pretty much assure you that if you do that, if you recognize it, if you admit it, and if you start to act outside of that circuitry, you will grow in wisdom, you will grow in intimacy, and you will speed your path to finding love by a lot. This is another thing, is that online dating is built to keep you looking and not finding, which is why I’ve devoted a lot of time to creating an online resource that is about real intimacy, that incubates intimacy from beginning, hopefully to end, and that’s DeeperDating.com. Please come and visit that site, and explore it. You can now meet people on there. You can create a profile, and you can meet other people and message with them all for free. I’d like you to just take a minute, as we move toward closing this episode and think, is there one thing that hit home for you in this, one thing that had charge, that had resonance for you, that felt important and significant around your own dating journey and search for love? Whatever that is, really value that. Just as we are saying, “Don’t move too quickly to the next while you’re dating. Don’t move too quickly to the next, when you have a beautiful insight or an awareness in your own search for love or intimacy journey because those things are gold.” Those are the things that make us stronger and wiser, and lead us to love. Those insights, those revelations have a very big bang for the buck. When we follow them and try to act based on them, doors open. I’ve seen this again and again. It is a beautiful truth. I want to encourage you to swipe slower, notice inspiration, and trust and honor your revelations about how you need to grow in your own search for love, and ways in which you can deepen in your capacity for love, and ways in which you can minimize the degree to which you flee love even as you’re searching for it. Thanks so much for listening and visit me on DeeperDatingPodcast.com or go to DeeperDating.com, and I look forward to seeing you on the next episode.

Table of Contents

• Holding With Cupped Hands
• Holding Both

2 Wonderful Ways To Heal Your Inner Conflicts

Wisdom-Hacks to Soothe Pain, Learn Love, and Find Healing

There are powerful life-changing techniques for handling our inner conflicts that most of us never get taught. Stay tuned to this episode of the Deeper Dating Podcast to learn two beautiful and powerful techniques to handle, evolve, and transform your own inner conflict. — Hello, everybody, and welcome to the Deeper Dating Podcast. I’m Ken Page and I’m a psychotherapist, author of the book Deeper Dating, and the Cofounder of DeeperDating.com, a new kinder, more respectful, and inspiring way for single people to meet online. Today, I’m going to talk about how we can hold and work with conflicting parts of ourselves. I’m going to share with you this week and every week, the greatest tools that I know to help you find love, keep it flourishing, and heal your life in the process, because the skills of dating are the skills of love. We know that those are the greatest and most important skills of all for a happy, rich, and meaningful life. If you want to learn more about this approach, go to DeeperDatingPodcast.com. You can get free gifts there when you sign up for my mailing list and get transcripts of every one of these episodes. I also just want to say that everything in this podcast is educational in nature. It’s not medical or psychiatric advice or treatment, and if you’re experiencing any serious psychological symptoms, please do seek professional help. If you like what you’re learning here, it would be so wonderful if you could subscribe and leave me a review. The reviews that I get are beautiful and powerful, and they help other people decide to tune in to this show. Thank you so much for that, and let’s jump in. The skills of dating are the skills of love.CLICK TO TWEETToday, I want to share with you two of the most beautiful exercises I know for self-healing, for evolution, and also for healing internal conflict and internal pain. I love these processes. I think they carry a great deal of wisdom and compassion. I’m excited to teach them to you, give you the framework for them, and then as you listen, you could simply, easily and quickly practice them. In some way, they’re no big deal at all. You’re going to get to do that during the course of this episode, and when the episode is over, you’ll have some rich experience with this and it will be portable. It’s a portable process, so you can take it with you and use it whenever you like. What these processes are going to do are going to create an inner environment that gives space and dignity to whatever it is that you’re struggling with, and to the different conflicting parts of you. By giving something space and dignity, and not demanding an instant solution, but trusting that this way of holding it with space and dignity will lead to some kind of growth and wisdom. The act of just doing that is very powerful. A brilliant researcher who many of you might have heard of, and psychotherapist, Carl Rogers, a powerful force in the field of humanistic psychology. He did a very seminal research study. He researched psychotherapists, who worked in a huge variety of approaches. Some were behavioral, all different kinds of approaches to psychotherapy. Some were psychoanalytic, and he researched many of them to see the success of their methods to determine which would be the most successful methods. This is what he found out. He found out that it wasn’t so much about the methods. That the magic ingredient, the secret ingredient, the ingredient that created change more than the technique itself was what he called Unconditional Positive Regard. That meant that the therapist looked at the client with a sense of respect, dignified where they were at, allowed them to be where they were at, and saw the person’s inherent goodness and worth. The act of looking at someone that way and interacting with someone in that way, that’s the way you hold their being as they struggle with their problems. It’s the most healing thing of all that can be done. These two processes that you’re going to learn are going to be ways that you are going to learn to hold yourself in crisis, in difficulty and in transition with unconditional positive regard. They’re simple, and they’re lovely.

Holding With Cupped Hands

I’m going to start with the first one now. This is one that I call “Holding with Cupped Hands”. If you’ve listened to a number of my podcasts, or if you’ve been to any of my classes or intensives, you’ve heard this concept before. It’s very precious. It’s very seminal. It’s very foundational to this approach. What it is, is being able to hold your humanity in the middle of conflict or difficulty with this sense of dignity, compassion, and caring. We’re going to do the hand motions. Hopefully, you’re not in public so that you could do this to get a sense of it. What I’d like you to do is to imagine that there is an issue that you’re dealing with. Go ahead and pick an issue that you’re dealing with in your life right now. Not a really hugely traumatic one. Maybe one that’s somewhat annoying or somewhat challenging, but not bigger than that. We’re going to think about how you hold this problem, knowing that the way that you will hold it is going to sculpt the outcome of how you grow around it to a large degree. If you imagine holding it with flat hands, just take your hands and open them up and hold them flat. No kindness, no warmth, just flat hands. Imagine this issue sitting there in this cold open space. Nothing really happens. Take your hands and imagine squeezing this problem tight, like trying to squeeze it into a solution. I think we all know what that feels like to try to squeeze something into some kind of premature or prefab solution that feels violent, colder or unkind to do. In the long run, it's the act of honoring that's the antidote to our bewilderment and the path to our own unique genius.CLICK TO TWEETNow, take your hands and hold them cupped like you were cupping holding a baby bird, and now just experience or imagine holding whatever this issue is with cupped hands, not worrying about a solution but just holding it in that way. How does that feel different? If you’re imagining doing it because you’re in a public space, how do you imagine that would feel different? This act of holding with cupped hands is one of the practices that in my intensives and my work with clients, we do often, we do again and again. We don’t only have to do this with problems or difficulties. The act of holding our humanity with cupped hands. When we do that, there’s a slowing down. There’s a connecting to maybe the sadness of our humanity, the decency, the goodness of our humanity. There’s something kind in it, and there’s something immensely soothing. It’s that amazing experience of being a good parent to yourself. It’s something I heard about for years and years, and didn’t get until I learned these processes. Maybe I didn’t learn them until I became a dad, and found out what that meant to hold your child’s heart and emotions with cupped hands. Take a minute right now and notice, recognize whatever it is you’re feeling at the moment. Just let yourself imagine holding it with cupped hands. You could do this physical symbol of holding your hands cupped like you were holding a baby bird, and imagine holding your heart and your humanity in your hands in that way. Let yourself feel that. I want to share with you some of the things that will happen for you, I believe, if you practice this. One thing that will happen will be that there will be a sense of dignity in you just being you, nothing other than you. In your quirkiness, in your craziness, in your sadness, in your sweetness, in your joy, in your excitement, in your whatever. There’s a way that you’ll be making space for the reality that a being who is just like you exists in the world.

  I think in some ways, this is the heart of the practice of being an artist, is that you don’t try to change your experience to be what you think it should be. Instead, you will hold your experience with cupped hands, and then you create an express from that place by allowing it to be. I think too that it makes us better human beings. We become the being we’re meant to be, and we get more comfortable in our own quirky skin when we do this. Also, there’s a kind of aura or blossoming of energy that happens out of this space. It’s a kind of luminosity. It’s a kind of being lit from within. Even in our sadness, even in our confusion, there is a feeling of beauty, and then the other thing is that somehow, it’s like we’re creating an environment of benevolence, which is healing and soothing, and somehow teaches us that it’s possible, that there is an environment of benevolence in the world and in life. Just the act of holding ourselves that way moves us closer to being sacred, moves us closer to a kind of magic that is our magic. When we do that, we glow as us in deeper and richer ways. It’s the ultimate holding environment in some ways, and it’s something that we can give ourselves, and we can do it when we feel joy, sadness, confusion, anything. That’s one process, this universal holding our hearts with cupped hands. I encourage you to try it and notice the differences that you experience in your own inner state, in your actions, and in your interactions. My guess is that if you do it for a while and start to feel it, it’s going to be a significant key, moving you to a more beautiful space, and a space that nourishes, allows, expresses, and creates intimacy and truth even more fully and deeply in your life.

Holding Both

Now, I want to talk about another process. This is  heavy stuff, I know. This is a process which I called “Holding Both”. It’s a process that we can do when we have conflicting sides, and God knows we all have a lot of conflicting sides. This is a process that you can do when you have two different conflicting sides. Why don’t you take a minute right now and imagine two different parts of yourselves that are both real and true but are conflicting. Maybe you have a part of you that is shy and afraid to speak out, and it’s real. It’s really a part of you. It affects and influences your life, and then you have another part of you that is fierce. The act of self-honoring may be challenging, but ultimately, it's the most comforting path of all.CLICK TO TWEETI know someone who calls that part of herself, the pirate queen. A part of yourself that wants to express things and does express things, that needs to express things. That would be one example of two conflicting parts. Maybe another set of conflicting parts would be a part of you that craves closeness, intimacy, and approval, and another part of you that craves freedom and truth. At different times, those parts pull in really different directions. The freedom and truth part might want independence, might want to say things that are going to get you in trouble, or maybe even hurt other people’s feelings, but they’re the truth for you. The other part of you doesn’t want to cause pain, wants connection, wants affiliation. It doesn’t want to hurt people. That’s another example of two different parts. Maybe you have a sexual part that’s wild, crazy, free and expressive, and another sexual part of you that’s private, quiet and deeply internalized. That would be another example. There are so many different examples of different parts of ourselves. A part that needs to be quiet that is deeply quiet, and another part that’s crazy, social and bubbly, all different parts. I’d like you to take a minute now, and think of two parts of you that are different and can get into conflict. They each want and need what they want and need, and don’t fit well together.

  Picture those two parts of you. Here’s what we’re going to do with this. I want you to imagine the first part, whichever it is, it could be either one. Imagine it as a child, your child, maybe 7, 8, 10, 12 years old, whatever feels right to you. You’re just going to let this child be your child, and you’re going to put this child on one knee, and you’re going to put your arm around this child. This is the part of you that is shy, timid, intense, expressive, and fierce, whatever those qualities are. This is one of those two children that are yours. Imagine this wonderful child that you love resting on one of your knees, and your arm around them, just like you would do with a child who had very particular needs, and your arm is around this kid. Now, think of this opposite quality of you. Imagine this as another one of your kids. It’s so different with a really different life trajectory, with different strengths, with different weaknesses, with a different journey altogether, but your kid, your child also. Imagine this child now sitting on your other knee, and you put your arm around this child too. You’re not going to do anything to make them communicate or be more like each other or change them. All you’re going to do is sit there with these two parts of yourself, one on each knee holding both of these kids, both of these precious, real, and true parts of your being. Such different children, but both yours, and just imagine taking your arms, keeping your arms and putting them around them, and just holding them. Now, feel what it’s like to hold both without trying to change either, your two very different children, and you love them both, and you’re holding them both. Try this right now for a moment and see how it feels. This is an exquisite way to evolve in your relationship with these two different parts of you. Both of which, of course, need a place at the voting table of your life. Probably, both of which have felt pissed off because they haven’t been listened to enough, cramped by the other one, and maybe judged as well. Maybe, one has been more appreciated than the other, but now you’re holding both. It’s a beautiful exercise, and when you do it, both of these precious parts of your being, both of which hold the true Core Gifts, which are essential for your being. Even if one of them is shy, timid, and afraid, it’s still true. That experience of simply holding both will make you so much of a richer, more amazing, and full human being. These are processes of honoring. I’d like to read something that I wrote in my book, Deeper Dating. “In the long run, it’s the act of honoring that’s the antidote to our bewilderment and the path to our own unique genius. The act of self-honoring may be challenging, but ultimately, it’s the most comforting path of all. Every other path hurts. Everything else is broken glass, sharp brambles in our side. Honoring is the skill that enables us to live the beauty and the mission of our Core Gifts in the world. It requires giving up the whip we wield against ourselves. It requires a kindness, a listening to our gifts. Anything less than honoring is essentially an act of quiet violence against ourselves. We can’t dishonor our Core Gifts without repercussions.” I want to read a beautiful poem from Thich Nhat Hanh, one of my great heroes in the world who, at this point, is very ill and probably not much longer for the world. He’s a true hero and nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by Martin Luther King. Here’s his poem, “I hold my face in my hands. No, I am not crying. I hold my face in my two hands to keep the loneliness warm, two hands protecting, two hands nourishing, two hands preventing my soul from leaving me in anger.” It’s a beautiful poem. As you practice these two techniques of deep, radical honoring, you will emerge more and more as you. That is a beautiful and powerful thing. It is the soil in which rich intimacy can grow in your life. Thank you for listening. I look forward to seeing you on the next episode of the Deeper Dating Podcast.

Table of Contents

• The Hunger To Be Accepted By Our Ultimate Parent
• The Hunger To Be Shared
• The Hunger To Cultivate Our Gift’s Opposite
• The Hunger For Discipline And Development
• The Hunger For Connectedness With The World

How To Empower Your Deepest Intimacy Gifts

The Five Essential Needs Of Your Core Gifts

How can you identify your deepest Core Gifts and how can you strengthen, empower, and nourish them in a way that transforms your life and your search for love? Stay tuned to this episode of the Deeper Dating Podcast to learn how. — Welcome to the Deeper Dating Podcast. I’m Ken Page and I’m a psychotherapist, the author of the bestselling book Deeper Dating, and the Cofounder of DeeperDating.com, which is a new and revolutionary platform for single people to meet in ways that are kinder, more inspiring, and emotionally safer. Today, I’m going to be talking about how you can identify and empower and nourish your Core Gifts, which are the attributes that are the most essentially you and really hold the key to your success in your intimacy journey. This week and every week, I’m going to share with you the greatest tools that I know to help you find love, honor the love that you find, and keep it flourishing while you heal your life in the process, because the skills of dating are the skills of intimacy, and the skills of intimacy are the greatest and most important skills of our lives. If you want to learn more about my work and receive some free gifts and hear about a lot of different resources, just go to DeeperDatingPodcast.com and you’ll also find transcripts of every episode there. I also just want to say that everything I share in this podcast is educational in nature. It is not medical or psychiatric advice or treatment. Finally, if you like what you’re learning here, I would love it if you could subscribe, leave me a review. Your reviews have been so beautiful and powerful and mean so much to me and kind of helped this project along. Thank you so much for that. Let’s jump in. I want to talk about the great hungers of your Core Gifts. Your Core Gifts are the most tender, sensitive, and passionate parts of you. They’re the places where you care the most and you feel the most, where you get most wounded and most inspired. They’re kind of the blueprint to understanding how you work in the world, what your mission is, what matters to you, and what is your language of love, and what are your languages of intimacy. We find our Core Gifts whenever we feel the most vulnerable and the most authentic, the most creative, the most passionate. As I describe in my book, Deeper Dating, they lie at the very heart of your creativity and your love. If we open to these Core Gifts, they guide us inexorably to what matters most to us. When we ignore them, which is so easy to do, we commit an act of quiet violence against ourselves.

In this episode, I’m going to help you discover your own Core Gifts and I’m going to talk about the five great hungers that these Core Gifts have. The parts of them that need to be fed and as you feed them, they become richer, stronger, more empowered, and they guide your life more powerfully. Of course, when they do, that means you’re leading with your heart, that means you’re leading with your soul, that means you’re leading with your essence and your truth. When you do that, the heft of your being, the power of your heart, in your kind of innate nature takes form in such important ways. Let’s talk about what your Core Gifts are. To discover what your Core Gifts are, which is the work of a lifetime, you can begin by asking yourself three very particular questions and then studying your life, studying your days and your minutes and your hours to see what the answers are. You’ll learn such usually important things about yourself when you do that. Here are the three questions. What qualities in you have led to your greatest experiences of joy? Now, that’s a complicated question. The first thing you would need to think about is, what have been your greatest and richest moments of joy. Maybe just think of a few of those really rich moments and then think, what’s an attribute of yours that led you to that joy. You can pause as often as you want for this podcast or you could just keep going and answer the questions as we go. Next question. What sensitivities in you have led to your deepest suffering? Then there’s that same process there where you think, “What have been my experiences of deepest suffering? Where do I suffer the most deeply? What are the sensitivities in me that are triggered by things that make me suffer?” These are core gift places, and then finally, what do you long to create or do in the world? What is there longing for in you? These also speak to Core Gifts Just in thinking about those questions, you can see that your answers, that this touches profoundly deep roots of your being, the deepest roots of your being and these core gift qualities need to be named, cherished, and fed by us if they’re going to flourish.

The Hunger To Be Accepted By Our Ultimate Parent

To thrive in this world, each gift that we have needs to be nourished in five particular ways. As I run through these five ways, just notice if any idea strikes a deep chord in you and if it does, again, you might just want to pause just to reflect on its personal meaning for you. The first thing that your Core Gifts need, first and foremost, is to feel accepted by their ultimate parent and that’s you, but that’s not always so simple because we get frightened by the intensity of our passion, for example. We get punished for the intensity of our passion, or we get punished for speaking truth, or we get punished for living and acting outside our prescribed gender roles, or we get stepped on because of our tenderness. Your Core Gifts are the most tender, sensitive, and passionate parts of you.CLICK TO TWEETSo many different ways that we have been trained that these most precious parts of ourselves, the most original and true and essential parts of ourselves are embarrassing, get us in trouble, hurt us, can’t be shown, can’t be seen, etc. Maybe you have felt this experience. I know I’ve been frightened by the intensity of my passion, all different kinds of passion. I know that I have felt many times that my heart was too tender to survive in the cold commerce of day-to-day life. Maybe you’ve felt something like that too, or that fear that if you really shared what you thought, and felt or wanted to express, that you’d be rejected or punished or misunderstood. All of these things point to our truth, our genius, our heart, our Core Gifts, and our authenticity. You know, many of us have been deeply hurt many times in each of the ways that I just mentioned. We learn to treat our gifts almost like children that we secretly love but publicly can feel embarrassed by. We treat our gifts gingerly. We create airbrushed versions of them that won’t get us in trouble. Most of us feel ambivalent about our Core Gifts and we know they’re the truest parts of ourselves but they scare us and for good reason because they are powerful, fierce, true, and essential, and spring from roots that are so not prefab. They’re so authentic, they’re so original and alive that it’s just scary to go with them. My parents were Holocaust survivors. I’ve talked about them a number of times. They learned the hard way that weakness meant death and I grew up as a boy in the ‘50s and the ‘60s who was a really sensitive kid and I was really ashamed of my sensitivity. I was embarrassed by how I was moved to tears in movies and humiliated by the intensity of my emotional responses to other people’s suffering and pain. So many things, joys and pains, knocked me down at the knees. They were hard for me to bear and I had a beautiful secret world where I loved and treasured these things, but I was also ashamed of them when it came to living them in the world, which meant that socially I was ashamed of them, which meant that there was a circuitry and a pathway that was going to lead to a lot of unhappiness in later years in my romantic life. Going back to then, I knew that my sensitivity was a weakness. Now, I know the opposite is true. I know that my weakness was my lack of respect for my own sensitivity. My weakness was in my terror of dignifying that sensitivity and that’s been one of the greatest, hardest, and richest lessons in my life. That sensitivity is one of my Core Gifts. I think that my best writing and my best work as a teacher and a psychotherapist springs from those very qualities I always thought I had to hide that were mortifying to me.

What does this touch for you? What are qualities like that, that are kind of coming into your consciousness as I’m saying these things, parts of yourself that are very alive and very true, that it’s been a journey to learn to dignify and treasure and honor? This work of deep self-acceptance doesn’t involve building some larger than life self-confidence, which is why I’m always troubled by dating advice that just tells you to be more confident. That’s easy to do when you’re feeling confident, but when you’re not feeling confident, that means that you just kind of need to fake it. What are the skills when you’re not feeling confident of being able to somehow still be confident in your not confidentness? I think those skills are saying, what’s not making me feel safe now? What’s not making me feel confident and honoring that and making space for it? That to me is true rich, self-dignifying, and kind of the antithesis of this model of faking confidence so that you look sexier. It’s really more about a moment-to-moment acceptance of your currents of experience and emotion running through every moment of your days. Our Core Gifts are always trying to get us to listen to them, like a kid is always trying to get his or her parents or their parents to listen to them. Our Core Gifts are trying to do that sometimes in a gentle whisper, sometimes in a painful shout, sometimes in sullen, angry silence, but as long as we’re alive, our Core Gifts are going to be waiting for us to love them and accept them and to finally give them their freedom.

The Hunger To Be Shared

Another hunger of our Core Gifts is the hunger to be shared. Giving and being given to are not luxuries, they’re imperatives. What water is to a plant, generosity is to your gifts. We all hunger to give. We need to give. We long for children. We long for pets. We long for loved ones because unfettered giving is one of life’s absolute joys. Our Core Gifts must be given and they must touch others, and we must see this happening before we can ever truly feel like we’re worthy. In my many, many, many years of practice as a psychotherapist, I’ve seen that my clients who are generous are the ones who are the most capable of happiness. It’s the ones who cherish and honor and water their generosity that have the happiest and richest lives, not always, but essentially, I find and in the long run, I really find that to be true. Which of your gifts are you longing to share?

The Hunger To Cultivate Our Gift’s Opposite

Here’s an interesting one. This is the third gift and that is your gift’s cultivation of its opposite or your cultivation of your gift’s opposite. What do I mean by that? In order for our gifts to have legs in the world, we need to develop their complementary opposite quality inside us. Our tenderness needs bravery if we’re going to ever share it with the world. If we’re visionaries and dreamers, we need to cultivate practicality for our creations to come to life. Practical people need to cultivate their dreamer self in order to create beauty in their lives. A generous person needs to cultivate his, her or their “no”. Really on some level, most of us would just kind of rather not do that work because it’s a hard uphill battle to cultivate the opposite quality of your dominant gifts but when you do it, something magnificent happens. As long as we're alive, our Core Gifts are going to be waiting for us to love them and accept them.CLICK TO TWEETYou feel your self-respect growing. When we do that, we feel more solid, more self-confident and we like ourselves more. It’s that feeling of mastery which feels so good and is so central to a life that works. We feel more like adults, but we maintain the kid inside us as well. Our core gift properties will always probably remain dominant, and that’s fine because perfection isn’t the goal, a rich life where we can take care of ourselves is. To help our gifts mature in the world, we need to help cultivate their opposite, so that we can use them more wisely. This is something really interesting. The less you’ve cultivated the opposite quality to your gifts, the more you’re going to be sexually and romantically attracted to people who carry that opposite quality in an extreme and not so great way. For example, somebody who’s really generous of spirit but can’t say no, is going to tend to be attracted to someone who is great at taking, but not so great at giving back. The more we cultivate these complementary qualities in ourselves, the more we’ll find ourselves attracted to people who appreciate our gifts and won’t take advantage of us.

The Hunger For Discipline And Development

Something else our Core Gifts hunger for is discipline and development. Our Core Gifts long to be respected enough, to be cultivated and developed. They hunger to test themselves to push past fears and obstacles and obstacle illusions. Just like a gifted child hungers to have her gift seen and acknowledged, our gifts hunger for that as well. They hunger for a mentor who honors them and gets them. They hunger for people who delight in their flights of excess, who shelter their vulnerability, and who send them out into the world to create and be shared. Creating that sense of inner-discipline is a rare accomplishment, and it takes time and effort. This is a poem that I really love by the great abstract painter Arthur G. Dove. “We have not yet made shoes that fit like sand nor clothes that fit like water nor thoughts that fit like air. There is much to be done.” Our gifts aren’t stagnant. They really long to take us somewhere. They compel us to take a risk, to turn the next corner, to meet the next enemy, to devour our next limitation. They’re hungry for that. When we learn to call them gifts instead of imperfections, then they find freedom from that kind of crippling carefulness that we can treat them with when we’re timid and afraid. That’s when they become joyously, ferociously hungry for the next new learning, and that’s when life becomes truly exciting. I want to say something else about this too is that our Core Gifts have a quality of joyful excess. Not all Core Gifts, but many of them do. When we’re in touch with our Core Gifts, we get silly, we get ridiculous, we get playful, we get sensual, we get creative, we laugh, we cry.

The Hunger For Connectedness With The World

There’s a quality of bigness and vibrancy and a kind of enthusiastic excess that is just such a central part of one of the things that our gifts need, just one, but one of the things that our gifts need in the world. Now, I want to talk about the final hunger that our Core Gifts have. These hungers all include connectedness with the world, connectedness with people who treasure them, who can play with them, whose gifts we can cultivate. I think that’s kind of assumed in all the things I’m saying, that hunger for living in connection with others in the world.

This last one which is greatness, your Core Gifts hunger for greatness, but just like we’re rethinking the meaning of gifts, let’s also rethink the meaning of greatness. Greatness is not necessarily fame or success. It’s really something much more humbling, and kind of much more exalted, and much more challenging. As we feed these hungers of our Core Gifts, we find ourselves touching the hem of some kind of felt greatness. One that might not even have words. We sense that we’re closer to some unknown, unnamed kind of native land with a really big open sky, that’s so broad, that we may never fully encompass it, but maybe we’ve been homesick for that greatness our entire lives. I think that our love of fame is a kind of cheapened expression for this hunger for personal greatness. I know for me, sometimes when I’m with my family, when I’m with the people I love, I’m hit by a quiet happiness that’s so strong that it almost burns. It feels huge and kind of heart swelling but so simple. That’s the greatest greatness to me. What are the greatnesses that your gifts yearn for? Take a moment to think about that and answer it for yourself. The Buddhists teach that we have seeds of suffering and seeds of joy inside us, and they never go away, they remain latent. What determines our life is the seeds that we water and the seeds that we allow to remain latent. When you water the seeds of your Core Gifts, your life blossoms and your intimacy life blossoms, and your ability to hold and cherish the tenderness and beauty of intimacy grows and increases and expands. I encourage all of you if you want to go to DeeperDatingPodcast.com and click on Ask Ken, share with me your experiences of trying these exercises, of feeding these great hungers of your great Core Gifts and let me know how that goes. Let the community of other listeners learn about how that goes. Thank you so much for listening and blessings in your journey to feed the powerful hungers of your innate Core Gifts. I look forward to seeing you in the next episode of the Deeper Dating Podcast in two weeks.

• • • Toxic Beliefs
    • Healing Sexual Trauma
    • Tips For The Chronically Single

How To Experience Sexual Healing While You’re Still Single: Sex Therapist Mike Moran

A Powerful Interview With Sex Therapist Mike Moran

How can we experience life-changing, powerful sexual healing while we’re single? Stay tuned to the Deeper Dating Podcast as I interview sex therapist, Mike Moran. — Hello, everybody and welcome to the Deeper Dating Podcast. I’m Ken Page, and I’m a psychotherapist, the author of the book, Deeper Dating, the Cofounder of the meeting site – DeeperDating.com, and of course, the host of this show. I’m excited today because I am interviewing a dear friend who is also a brilliant sex therapist. Mike Moran is going to be talking to us about how we can experience and create sexual healing before we’re in a relationship. This week and every week, I’m going to share with you the greatest skills I know to help you find love and keep it flourishing and heal your life in the process because the skills of dating are nothing more than the skills of love, and the skills of love are the greatest skills of all for a happy and meaningful life. If you want to learn more about the deeper dating path to real intimacy, just go to DeeperDatingPodcast.com. You can sign up for my mailing list, you’ll get free gifts and you can get transcripts of each of these episodes, including this one. I also want to say that everything I share in this podcast is educational in nature. It is not medical or psychiatric advice or treatment, and if you’re experiencing any serious psychological symptoms, please seek professional help. Finally, if you like what you’re learning here, it would be a wonderful thank you if you subscribed and left me a review on iTunes or elsewhere. Thank you so much for that. Without any further ado, I want to introduce my dear friend and  deeply respected colleague, Mike Moran. Let me tell you a little bit about Mike, why I’m excited to have him on this show. Mike is an LCSW and a psychotherapist, a certified EFT couples’ therapist and supervisor, a certified sex therapist, and a certified inner bonding facilitator based in New York, where he specializes at the intersection of relational and sexual challenges. He’s the Founder and Director of The Center for Relational Fulfillment, and he’s on the board of directors of the New York Center for Emotionally Focused Therapy. Mike also presents internationally training therapists on sexual issues in EFT, couples therapy, and he’s also taught graduate courses in marriage and family therapy, and LGBTQ practice at Rutgers University. He offers weekend workshops to couples. Mike says that he views erotic energy as chi, meaning life force or creative vitality, and loves helping people remove the barriers to creating authentic, passionate connection emotionally and sexually. You can learn more about his work by going to FulfilledCouples.com. I know Mike for decades. We’ve worked together many times, and you will get this quality of goodness, decency, intelligence, clarity, integrity, and smarts that he emanates, which is why it’s such a joy for me to have him on the show. Welcome, Mike. Thank you, Ken. Thank you for that introduction. I feel all warm inside. It’s all true about you. I am so glad to have you here because this is such an important topic that doesn’t get talked about enough, and single people who are not yet in a relationship don’t know the tools that are available to them to grow in their sexuality and their sexual healing while they’re dating, and before they’re in the committed relationship that they’re searching for. The way I would love to start is with you telling us anything about your story and what led you here. Sure. I think on a fundamental level, sex, erotic energy has always been very important to me. I am a sexual person. I honor that energy, and I feel like it’s been an integral component to my own healing. I was born with a birth defect that impacted my sex life. I was in sex therapy as a single gay young man in my twenties, and it changed my life. That awakened me to the power of sexual energy, and how if we do our work, it can enlighten us. As I say in my bio, I think of erotic energy, sexual energy as chi, as life force. For so many of us, that energy has been dampened. It’s been tainted by many things, so I help people. I help folks liberate that. Trauma occurs in relationships. It is also healed in relationships.CLICK TO TWEETThat is beautiful and powerful. Can you tell us more about how you do that? For our listeners as well, what’s the journey that they can take as they learn from you, as we speak?

Toxic Beliefs

I’ve worked with many people over the years. Straight, gay, transgender, gender fluid, who have recognized in themselves that they sense that this wonderful energy, this wonderful life force that lives within them has been tainted, and has been dampened  down. We go on a journey together to learn about how their sexuality, how their sexual energy, their Eros, emerged in their body. How it lives in their body, how it came of being, and then how it lives in their body now, and how the myths, the messages. In our culture, I don’t care if you’re straight, gay, what have you. The culture at large, mainstream culture can do a real number on us. It’s like toxins. We ingest these negative beliefs and messages and myths about sex that can do a number on us and that can hijack our capacity to let that energy flow in us. That’s one of the questions I ask the folks that I work with, “What toxins have you swallowed in the culture at large, in your family culture? What lives within you that, perhaps, you and I can help release, get that poison out of there?” That is beautiful and powerful. Let’s have a moment so that all of the audience could think about this. Maybe you even want to take out a paper and pen, or maybe you’re walking or driving and you want to pause this and think about it, but this is a powerful question. You’re saying, Mike, it’s the very first question, it’s where you start on this journey. Let’s all do this for a minute. Let’s sit with this question that Mike asked. Mike, can I ask you to ask it once more, and then we’ll give people a minute to think or to pause, and reflect on it? Sure, of course. What toxins have you swallowed that are living in your body from the culture at large, from your family, from your friends? What lives in your body that isn’t authentically you? What messages, what poisons do you need to release to come to embrace a healthy, loving, powerful model of sexuality? Beautiful. Here’s something I want to say that I’m going to ask you to address in a minute, Mike, which is for those listeners who have experienced real sexual trauma, this could be a very triggering question. Feel free to answer this in a brief and general way and not to dive in, to be aware of what triggers you. To take care of yourself in the process of answering this question, you might want to answer it on a very broad level. Stand as far away from the trauma as you need to, to be able to look at it, even if it’s from ten miles back and getting a kind of a safe view of it. I wanted to put that in for people who’ve experienced trauma because it’s a rich and important question we all should be able to ask. It doesn’t have words. It’s a feeling of shame that I feel goes deep inside my being kind of to the point of curling my toes and my fingers. It’s a sense of shame and it’s a deep belief. Goodness is important to me, and it’s a deeply imprinted belief that sex and goodness are antithetical. That’s a myth that I’ve spent my life working to deal with. I wanted to share mine because it’s such a beautiful question and I wanted to kind of model a little bit of answering that question. That’s beautiful, Ken. I’ve worked a lot with shame as I’m sure you have. Personally, and in my work with folks, shame is a big one. Isn’t it? It can hijack our ability to own our truth in our lives. It can just shut us down, and what’s the underbelly of that? What’s going on there? What have we taken in that we haven’t released yet? That is not us, but it’s in us. Well said. Asking this question and articulating even more fully, what the words are to that shame? Would that be the next step?

  Absolutely, to slow things down. You weren’t born with that shame inside you. Something happened there and it came of being. What happened there? What’s the story of how shame began to take over your experience of your sexuality, if indeed that’s occurring?

Healing Sexual Trauma

I know there are more questions, Mike, and I have a choice point question for you. What this is bringing up for me, as all the people who are listening, who have experienced sexual trauma and violation? I think I would like to pause and hear any insights because this is huge. It was one of the questions I was going to ask you. If you could address for folks, those of us who have experienced sexual abuse or sexual trauma and have the deep trauma reverberations inside our being, how do people in that situation? Do you have any thoughts you want to share about the healing journey around that? I was glad that you added that, Ken, because I’ve worked a lot with sexual trauma. I can talk about a case with a person I’m working with right now. The first thing I would say with this is in order for us to open to our trauma, we have to feel safe enough to do that. If you’re working on your own and beginning to open that box, pay attention to what’s happening for you, pay attention to your body. Sometimes, memories have been kind of stored in there and then they start to emerge. I’ve worked with folks where that’s been the case. If you find yourself feeling that your trauma has limited you and you want to do the work of washing it out, go slow and be gentle. As you open to what happened, learn about how, then how you respond to what happened. I’ll tell you why. I worked with a woman who had been date-raped in college. It was interesting. After it happened, she repressed the whole thing. She pushed it down. She forgot about it. She was pretty promiscuous in college afterward, and we wondered if that was a component, if the trauma was playing out on some level. Anyway, it reemerged. After she got married, she had had a satisfying sex life with her partner, but about a year into the marriage, all the trauma came up in front and center, and her body completely shut down. I worked with her for about a year when I’d had the partner come in sometimes. She had an awesome husband. I loved this guy. He was great, but the key was helping her open to that she’s in control, that she’s the one, that she gets to decide about her body. She holds the reigns and nobody else holds the reins around her sexuality. It was a very healing work. Since safety is the first order of business for many people working on trauma, it is good to get help, right? Absolutely, especially with trauma because it’s overwhelming. Remember, trauma occurs in a relationship, trauma is healed in a relationship. I encourage folks who have had to deal with that to get help. Here’s another question. This is not in any way to discount the importance of therapy and doing trauma work, but if trauma can be healed through relationship, how can trauma be healed through your relationship with yourself? Let’s say you’re a single person. You’re not having sex. Maybe you’re having sex occasionally with people that you date. Maybe you’re having recreational sex. Maybe you’re just masturbating and wanting to do your healing work in that. Could you share thoughts in addition to, or on the side, even instead of, therapy, what are ways that people can heal sexual trauma and sexual wounding in their relationship with themselves before they are in a partnership? It’s a good question. I relate to it. I think I did a lot of my healing as a single person. Own your disabilities from a place of empowerment instead of shame.CLICK TO TWEETI have talked a lot about being in a support group for chronically single psychotherapists, and Mike was one of my support group members. We were in this together. We were. It was very healing for us. I loved that group. I would say, the first step, if you’re going to work on this on your own is do the work on every level. There’s the mind. That’s what we talked about the myths, the messages, do that work, and understand how it lives in your body from an insight perspective. Also, get to know your body. If you had trauma, how does the trauma impact your relationship to your body? How do you feel about your body? I’m working with a gentleman right now who’s had major trauma. I gave him an exercise, “Just lay naked on your bed and notice sensations of what’s happening. Just slow down.” A lot emerged for him because he had never thought to do that before. I would encourage you to slow things down and get to know what goes on inside your head, what goes on inside your body, what’s your relationship to your body? Do your best to keep a deep sense of curiosity,  just noticing it all. What a powerful, beautiful, and simple exercise for reflection. It can be very powerful. The other thing that I encourage you to do is all of us have what we call an erotic blueprint. All of us have our own unique algorithm that allows our sensual sexual energy to come alive. There’s more direct stimulation. There’s the senses, our  sensuality, and then there’s what we call psychogenic, which is thoughts, feelings, fantasies, what have you. Do some exploration around “what’s your erotic blueprint? How does your sexual energy begin to hum? I ask folks, “How does your erotic engine get turned on and  humming? What happens there?” Get deeply curious because we’re all a little different in that place. That’s wonderful. That’s something I talk about too in my book, like different components of that are what moves you in sex. What emotionally moves you? What makes you feel safe, and what turns you on, and holding all of those together is. that’s the rich place. That’s the wonderful place. I want to share, Mike, the genesis of this episode. You and I were in a cafe together maybe 6 or 7 years ago. I don’t know if you remember this, but I remember it so vividly. We were sitting there drinking our ice coffee together, and I asked you, “In your work as a sex therapist at this point,what’s exciting you the most?” What you said was beautiful and powerful to me. I would like you to speak about that a little bit and I’ll say what that was. This is what you said to me. Tell me because I don’t remember.

  I will tell you and it was awesome. It opened a whole new vista of pathways to healing and a possibility. This is what you said, “This is what interests me. No matter how traumatized someone might be that I am working with, there’s a zone that they can go into where they can be sexual and feel good inside and feel unblocked and unfettered. There’s circuitry that they can go into where things work for them, even if they’ve been traumatized. Even if a great amount of the time they can’t do that, there are times when it’s smooth sailing. They are just in alignment with themselves. I’m fascinated by what it is that allows that to happen.” What it is that allows them to drop into that groove where they can celebrate their sexuality in such a satisfying way. Tell us what you have learned about what helps people, no matter what, be able to drop into that groove. I think a real component is the yearning to do it, the motivation to do it, the persistence to keep learning about, what are the barriers to you claiming your unique, beautiful version to your sexual energy? I’ve worked with folks with all kinds of fetishes. For so many of us that grow up in a culture that denigrates anything that is “other”, it shuts us down before we even know that we’re shutting it down. I’ve worked with many of the fetishes, the Adult Diaper community. I’ve worked with folks were in Puppy Play, which is your erotic energy comes alive through primarily portraying an animal, what have you. The human experience, the mind, the nervous system, all of it is so rich. I think with that, those of us who are willing to move beyond the confines of this world that we live in, that tells us that we’re not allowed to be ourselves in whatever’s going on in there, those of us who have the chutzpah to move beyond that, I think that’s the impetus to be able to link into that group. Can you allow yourself to be your erotic self ,in all its glory, whatever that is, however that begins to come alive within you? I think that’s the underbelly of it all. Many people, including myself, have real feelings about claiming that truth and that borrows back to the myth, the messages, the stuff that we’ve taken in that we have to move, we have to release, and we have to throw and vomit out. This is great because this is work that everyone, no matter where they are in the spectrum of single to committed couple hood can do. Every one of us can do this, and if you do it now before you’re in a relationship, it will save you a great deal of grief and allow you a great deal more of happiness. This is a wonderful time to be doing that work. Mike, the first thing you talked about so richly was naming the myths that we’ve swallowed our sexual freedom that block us from being who we can be sexually. Now you’ve talked about naming your algorithm, acknowledging what brings you to the place where your heart is alive, your Eros is alive, and you’re turned on and your engine is humming, and I love that. Can you frame that for the audience as a question that we can all sit with for a moment? Sure. Let me put it this way, which borrows back to Jack Morin’s work, which is amazing. Think about it this way. Let’s say you’re not turned on at all. You’re not feeling erotic at all, but you would like to be. What are the thoughts, feelings, images, and fantasies? What’s all that you know would be the best bet to help you come alive there, to help your erotic portal open and for you to move into that altered state of Eros coming alive in you? What are all the factors that come into play there? What is it about those qualities? What is it about those that make it so inviting, that make it so enticing? Let’s ponder that for a moment. That is beautiful. It is such rich, wonderful stuff. Thank you, Mike. This is great. We heal through compassion, not judgment.CLICK TO TWEETYou’re very welcome. Was there more you wanted to say there, or should I jump to my next question? I think we’re good. Keep jumping, Ken. I want to ask about, and this is like a huge range. I’m going to say them all in this one question, but feel free to separate them. What about people who have shame about organic conditions of any sort, who are single and feel scared of entering into a relationship or even the dating world because of shame around disabilities, things in their sexual anatomy, scarring, STDs like herpes, any of these kinds of things that could make people feel, “I know this takes me out of the game?” You’re talking my language because I have a birth defect. This is exactly what my journey was and I value the sexual energy that I did this work. I think the key with that is to do your best to let go of seeing your disability, your scarring, your STD, your herpes. Do your best to let go of framing it as this is my illness, this is where I’m damaged, this is my defectiveness. Do your best to soften the gaze and try to see it through the lens of, “This is the body that I was meant to explore, that I was meant to have on this journey of embracing my sexual truth.” In fact, this was part of it. Try to see it as a component of your journey. Try to shift the lens from it being a deficit to more of an attribute of your unique journey. Did you do that, Mike? I have done that. I have crossed the bridge in that capacity and it’s been very powerful, but it’s hard. It’s not a one conversation thing. That’s a burner. I just want to say something about this journey concept because I guess, when we look at ourselves and our defects, whatever they are, are glaring, obvious, and embarrassing. We feel like, “How would anyone be turned on to me?” Maybe we even feel like, “I wouldn’t be turned on to me,” and all of these thoughts that are kind of crushing. The question you asked was not as simple as, “how were these parts of me just fine, just beautiful? How is this actually part of my authentic sexual journey of claiming my sexuality? That’s a shift and that’s very profound, and thank you so much for sharing something so personal with us because then everyone who’s dealing with that can say, “He knows what he’s talking about. He’s been through it.”

  It’s developing the capacity to own it but from a place of empowerment versus a place of shame and trying to cover it up, trying to pretend that it’s not there, or foreclosing on your dating or sexual journey because you can’t imagine. You are giving into fear versus claiming it as a component of your journey, of your life that is meant to be there for you to learn from. Ultimately, I see all of life as a classroom. It’s all a classroom and we all have to embrace what we’ve got and what we’ve been given.

Tips For The Chronically Single

Mike, this is so beautiful, so rich and I have some more questions for you. Sure. What about people who’ve been chronically single for a long time and want to get out into the dating world, and are just afraid and feel rusty with dating? Ken, you shared. We were in our chronically single therapist group. I think what I would say with that, where I come from that, I think about how I tortured myself about that. I labeled myself. I used it as an identity, “I’m chronically single,” and I’ve been partnered now for thirteen years. I look back at the young man. I used that label to torture myself. I think the first step is, so you’ve been single for a long time. That’s all it means; you’ve been single for a long time. It doesn’t mean you’re defective. It doesn’t mean you’re broken. It doesn’t mean that nobody’s ever going to want to date you. All it means is that you’ve been single for a long time. That’s all it means. Don’t take that like Ken and I did and run with that and torture yourself with it. That’s all it is. It’s just data. It’s information. You’ve been single for a long time. What’s your next step toward taking a risk and getting up there again? If you want to internet date, great. If you don’t, great. If you want to take a class, I had a client, who met her partner in an Italian class. She took an Italian class and ended up meeting her partner. What’s your next step? Seeing it through the lens of this, I keep coming back to this word, journey. Do your best not to focus on this destination of, “Where is my partner?” See it as a journey of moving toward this person. I remember and it is true, it’s such a cliche when they talk about it, it comes out of nowhere, what have you, but it is true. When I met my partner, I met my partner at  Big Apple Ranch, which is a gay square dance in the middle of Manhattan. I remember the night so well because it was all I could do not to cancel. If I hadn’t promised my friend to meet him at this thing, I would never have gone. I remember getting into the shower and being like, “Why am I going to this thing?” I don’t even like country music. I just was not there, but I showed up and my partner was there and I’ve been with him for thirteen years. You just don’t know. You just have to keep taking the next step and do your best to not frame it from a negative place. Mike, I’m smiling because I quote you all the time in my classes and my courses without mentioning who you are. This is another thing that relates to that because when you were searching, or maybe it was when you first met Steve, and I said to you, “What are you doing now that’s different?” You said, “Ken, I’ll tell you what I’m doing. I get home from work and the last thing I want to do in the world is to take a shower and get dressed and go out.” It literally makes me feel sick to my stomach, but I know that if I don’t do that and go to events where there are spiritual gay men, I will never find my partner, and I quote you on that all the time. Sexual energy is powerful. It's beautiful energy. It's healing energy. It's vitality. It's an awesome part of living on this planet.CLICK TO TWEETIt is because that’s exactly what happened when I met Steve. I’m telling you; I remember getting into the shower like I can’t breathe. I’m dragging my butt up the Seventh Avenue. I lived in the West Village at the time. I think I remember that walk. I was dragging myself into that building, but it’s true, we have to get in the ring, don’t we? We have to get in the ring and the ring also includes doing the rich sexual questioning and mining of treasures that you are describing. I have another question for you. I want to talk about the whole issue of hooking up. This is a show for people who are into the conscious search for love so we don’t talk that much about hooking up. I think many people here don’t do that. I think that there are also many people who do that and wonder how they feel about it, and wonder if it’s a good thing to do. I would like us to talk for a few minutes about this issue of this conscious journey of healing. If your commitment is toward healing, and you’re single and you want sex, how to hold this issue of hooking up? I would love to hear any of your thoughts. Firstly, I want to preface this by saying, I’m a sex-positive sex therapist. What I mean by that is, if the sex is consensual, respectful, and safe and everybody in the room, regardless of how many people are in the room, are having pleasure, if everyone is having pleasure, then rock and roll. I don’t judge any of that. Now, that said, if you’re recognizing that who you are in that context, your behavior, what you’re doing, if you are starting to get those inner promptings of, “This is not really reflective of my deepest truth. This is not reflective of who I want to be. This is not my wisest self that’s doing that.” You’re wanting to deepen into, “What is my wisest self with respect to the challenging conundrum of being a sexual being?” Some of us have very high sex drives, and being single and needing that release and needing that outlet. Trust me, I very much empathize with that. That said, if you’re feeling like, “This is not who I want to be here,” do some exploration. What is the part of you that’s doing the hooking up? What is that part wanting? What’s going on there? Do your best to open to compassion. We heal through compassion, not judgment. Do your best to soften the gaze, let the inner critical wounded part of you ask him or her to step outside for a moment and do some compassionate learning about, “What’s happening in this place? What’s going on?” There’s the part that is doing something here. There’s the part that is acting in a way that’s not in alignment with who you want to be, and so you want to get curious, partner with this part of you. Learn about what’s going on there. It may feel better to hook up and to engage in casual sex in a way that ultimately doesn’t feel right to you, but maybe it’s serving you because it’s helping you not feel more vulnerable feelings. Maybe it’s helping you to distract yourself from feelings that otherwise would be knocking on your door. What I say with that is to get curious, slow down, and learn about it. Whatever you do, don’t beat yourself up. There are always good reasons for why this stuff plays out the way it does. Beautiful. Thank you, Mike. I agree with you. It’s important that even when we are acting in ways that might be not great for us sexually, that we still hold the beauty of our sexuality and remember that first and primarily. That’s wonderful. Mike, you’ve shared so many rich, wonderful things. One thing that I’ve appreciated is you have articulated all of these kinds of thorny and important and highly charged issues as a journey that we can be kind to ourselves around and curious and exploratory, which is what I love about your work and why I so wanted to have you on the show. I’m glad you picked up on that, Ken. It’s a fundamental tenet of how I work with folks and I help them open to their journey through the eyes of compassion, not judgment. You have been through that journey and we are all on that journey together.

  We are, indeed. Mike, we’re moving toward closing now and in a minute, I’m going to ask you to talk about how people could get in touch with you and reach out and find out more about your work and take part in it if they’re moved to do that, but first, are there any last closing words that you want to share with this community? This borrows back to what we touched on earlier in our conversation, but I think what I want to emphasize is erotic energy and sexual energy are powerful. It’s a beautiful energy. It’s healing energy, it’s a vitality, it’s aliveness , it’s such an awesome part of living on this planet. As we all well know, living on this planet can be challenging, but it’s like anything. It can be used in the service of the best parts of ourselves or it could be used in the service of these wounded parts. I think the key is to honor the energy, honor how powerful it is, honor its role in your life because, of course, that looks different for everybody. Respect it because it’s a beautiful part of living, in my opinion. Mike, that’s wonderful. I just want to acknowledge you and all the other folks in the world who are brave adventurers in exploring sexual healing because it’s still is so taboo and limited in this world and in this country. This is a statement of gratitude for all the people working on sex and sexuality in the world, and to you in particular. For everyone who wants to explore this more fully, some of the things that Mike talked about, who want to learn from him, hear more about what he’s doing, what he believes in, what he’s studying, what he’s teaching, how can people find out everything about you, Mike? Just go to my website, it’s www.FulfilledCouples.com, and if you want to email me directly, my email is Mike@FulfilledCouples.com. That’s the easiest way. Mike, I can’t thank you enough for your years of loyal and wonderful friendship, for the work that you’re doing in the world, and for sharing this with us. Likewise, Ken. I remember us doing the retreats back in the day where I would do the music and we’ve had a rich journey together. It’s true. Mike is a musician and a songwriter, by the way, as well. Mike, thank you. Thank you everybody for listening. You can go to DeeperDatingPodcast.com to sign up for my mailing list. I look forward to seeing you on the next episode. Just a reminder that at this point, I’m only doing episodes every two weeks for the time being, so see you then and thank you so much. Thank you, Mike, once again. Thanks, Ken.

Table of Contents

• • • Married To A Narcissist
    • Toxic Hypnosis
    • A Time For Hope

Watch the episode here:

Trump, Coronavirus, And The Greatest Lesson Of Love

Acknowledging The Devastating Effects Of A Toxic Relationship 

The first and greatest lesson of love relationships is being played out now in our country around Coronavirus in the current administration. It’s being played out in so many of our lives. Stay tuned to this episode to learn what that lesson is and what we can learn from what’s happening now in our country. — I’m Ken page. I’m a psychotherapist author of the bestselling book, Deeper Dating, the Cofounder of the dating site, DeeperDating.com, and the host of this show. I’m going to talk about the first great lesson of intimacy and how that plays out in so many of our lives and how it’s playing out in our country, around Coronavirus, and the current administration. This week and every week, although I’m now doing these podcasts every two weeks for the time being, I will share the greatest tools that I know to help you find love and keep it flourishing and heal your life in the process because the skills of dating are nothing more than the skills of intimacy. Those are the greatest and richest skills of our lives. If you want to learn more about the Deeper Dating path to finding intimacy, just go to DeeperDatingPodcast.com. If you sign up for my mailing list, you can get a number of free gifts and learn more about these ideas and how to use them. There are also transcripts of every episode of this podcast. Also, I want to say that everything I share in this podcast is educational in nature. It is not medical or psychiatric advice or treatment. If you’re experiencing any serious psychological symptoms, please seek professional help. Finally, if you like what you hear here, I would love it if you could subscribe and leave me a review. The reviews that I get are very beautiful, very touching, very important, and also let other people know about this show. Thank you so much for that. Now, we’re going to jump in. In my work and in my life, the place where I have seen and experienced the greatest and most intractable pain has been around the compelling power of unhealthy toxic relationships. When you choose someone who is not safe, whose character is not good, and it’s so hard because they have such great promises that they make to you, or because they almost love you, or because they’re so sexy or they have so much to offer, it’s an attraction of deprivation. These kinds of attractions are some of the most intractable issues that I have seen. I feel like the thing that I see that stops people, apart from the lack of wiser information about intimacy, the thing that causes the most pain and blocks people the most is the addiction to the “stuckness” with unhealthy, toxic relationships. I think that this is happening in our country and we can see it with what’s going on with the way that we as a country have addressed Coronavirus and how Trump and his administration have actually led us into tremendous, tremendous pain and suffering and loss. Similar to what happens when we decide to enter into relationships with toxic people. This is like a cautionary tale. By looking at what’s happening in our country, we can understand the single-most painful dynamic that happens in romantic relationships and the single most important lesson. The inner world of a narcissist is a rancid place, and the narcissist wants to drag other people into that space.CLICK TO TWEET

Married To A Narcissist

By looking at these personal relationships, we can understand more what seems to be happening at this time in our country. I think that on both counts, this is pressing and urgent, and I have a lot to say. It’s going to be hard. It’s going to be a kind of cautionary tale, but it’s also going to be filled with hope because when we can see a hypnosis for what it is, we can break free from a toxic relationship. I want to say, this is not about Trump’s policies. This is not about being a Democrat or being a Republican. It’s about character. What’s being acted out in the state of our country and in the world is that many Americans have fallen in love with a profound narcissist. The sign there, the key great difficulty, is the inability to de-center from what you want and the importance of how you’re perceived, and to be able to actually look at the world with great empathy. I think it would be really hard to disagree that this is an area where Donald Trump is profoundly weak, and where that weakness, specifically in regard to Coronavirus, has led to death, death of loved ones, more deaths to follow of our precious loved ones because Coronavirus is not something that Trump wants to admit to or deal with because it doesn’t make him look good. The description of this kind of narcissism was beautifully described by E.B. Johnson in an article in Medium called How your personality changes after surviving narcissistic abuse. “Narcissistic abuse,” the author says, or a toxic relationship, I add in, “occurs through verbal abuse, emotional manipulation, and even all-out campaigns of fear, threats, and terror. A narcissist is unable to see the inherent value in anyone else because they’re only able to see their needs, desires, and perspectives.” Let’s talk about this on a personal level. How many of us have been in relationships with a narcissist? How many of us have been in a toxic relationship with someone who couldn’t de-center from their own needs and would hurt us and hurt others because of their inability to choose compassion over self-gratification? How many people do you know now that are in those situations? How many times have you had loved ones in situations of relationships with people where you knew that this was so bad for them and these otherwise really intelligent people when you tried to show them the facts, their eyes would kind of glaze over? They would have rationalizations; they would have excuses. How many times have we done that? How to capture the degree of pain and lost years and suffering, not to mention abuse, not to mention abuse of our children, not to mention the loss of friendships and other relationships, because the narcissist feels threatened by those other connections and other alliances, and pushes us to dissolve them, from the subtlest level to the grossest level?

  Most of us have seen in deep and powerful ways, the devastating effects of a toxic relationship, and the kind of hypnosis occurs where we don’t want to admit that. Coronavirus is bad, for Trump and how he looks at his success. He prefers that it doesn’t exist. Testing makes the numbers look bigger, so let’s slow it down. If children don’t go back to school, that’s going to hurt our economy. It’s going to hurt the optics of how our country looks, and how I look, and whether or not I’ll get re-elected. Let’s make sure that no matter what, we send them to school, and we’ll pull funding of any school that doesn’t support that. Just a little bit of room for the devastating reality of those children, of those immune-compromised or vulnerable teachers, of the families that love these people. Just another few examples of this so that we could see just kind of the most important political, and personal lesson, which is the devastating hypnosis of toxic relationships and how easy it is to succumb to them. Few things, for example, on January 20th, the first Coronavirus case was reported in the United States and South Korea. Within the first two weeks of that case, South Korea had nationwide testing. Two days after that case, Trump said, “It’s all under control.” On February 6th, the World Health Organization distributed a quarter-million tests. We declined those tests. We produced 90 tests and they were faulty. On February 28th, Donald Trump said that Coronavirus is the Democrat’s new hoax. How many of his supporters believed that and didn’t wear masks, didn’t take care of themselves, didn’t protect themselves? Trump actually said that wearing a mask could be seen as a political statement against him. The breathtaking degree of narcissism here, and the deaths that that led to need to be faced and need to be embraced. We need to look at ways in which we have allowed ourselves in our own life to say yes to the horrible hypnosis of toxic relationships. Just continuing, on April 4th, he said, “It might be okay to go to work even if you have the Coronavirus.” He said, “Anybody who needs a test, it is there.” Now, this was a complete lie. This is kind of the concept of gaslighting, which I’ll get to in a minute, because at that time, 3 of the 100 public laboratories that we have had a working CDC test. Early in March, 1 in 100,000 people in the United States received tests compared to 1 in 342 in South Korea, and analysis of data from healthy metrics and evaluation suggests that countless deaths could have been avoided if Trump supported social distancing and masks simply a few weeks earlier, as he had been warned for months, but he was helpless against that because of character.

Toxic Hypnosis

This is such a deep and important thing. I’m going to shift to talking about intimate relationships. Ultimately, when you’re weighing character in one hand and promise in the other, character is going to end up on top. In the long run, character is what’s going to influence everything. I quote Hara Marano, the Advice Columnist for Psychology Today frequently and she says, “There are three Cs in looking for love; character, character, and character.” We are 4% of the world’s population, but in July, we had over 50% of all the Coronavirus cases. To keep our country safe, we must have a leader who can step outside of themselves and see the needs of others.CLICK TO TWEETIn July, Trump said, “We have one of the lowest death rates.” But of all the countries in the world, we have the fourth-highest death rate and we’re one of the wealthiest and most industrialized nations in the world. We have an incredible opportunity here to save lives, to save our lives, and to understand the first rule of intimacy is that character is everything. All of us have certainly seen such terrible things happen as we witness our loved ones in toxic relationships. How much pain have each of us experienced seeing that and being helpless? Right now, we’re witnessing that in our country today because of Donald Trump’s inability, in his case, narcissism, to understand the validity and worth of anything outside of what he wants and needs and how he is perceived. The country’s being ripped apart. As a country, we are now so hungry to be able to finally address racism in a deeper way. Trump is denying all of that and turning it into an ugly civil war because Coronavirus crosses him, it doesn’t look good, it goes against what he wants to be seen as, and the experience of him feeling like he’s wearing a mask makes him feel weak. He’s not interested in what he’s modeling for the country and all of his supporters. He’s just not interested in that. What he’s interested in is how he looks and this is an interesting thing. The inner world of a narcissist crossed is it has rancidity, it’s a rancid place. None of the oxygen that comes with getting outside yourself exists in that inner world. In that space, the narcissist wants to drag other people into that space. Trump, as the most powerful person in many ways on the planet, is trying to drag the entire country into the rancid space of his resentment, insecurity, and rage when it comes to Coronavirus and the reality of this pandemic. It is breathtaking to see how many people willingly follow him into that space. That brings me to my second point about this and that is the hypnosis that occurs when you’re in love with, or when stuck in, a toxic relationship. This hypnosis is one of the most powerful things that I have ever witnessed. I will share with you that my dad, who’s a holocaust survivor, said, “I can understand how to turn a population into Nazis. I can understand how to do what Hitler did. Here’s how you do it. You sow fear, and then you create an enemy, and you make that enemy less than you.” He does that with all his enemies and that foments hate and creates a degree of danger, violence, resentment, and unrest because there is no modeling of humanity and decency. That hypnosis happens as well for people in toxic relationships. We’ve all seen it. We’ve seen it in our own lives, and we’ve seen it in the lives of people we love. It’s powerful and it’s so intractable and it goes so deep. For example, really smart people don’t wear masks because they feel that it is anti-Trump. The rally in Tulsa, smart people were in that rally. They signed papers saying that they would not hold the administration accountable if they caught the Coronavirus and people died as a result most probably from that rally. Then they were pushed together into a tight space so that it would look good for the optics as though there were more people. People did this willingly in the time of a deadly pandemic. This is so rich and so amazing and tells us so much about willingly entering into toxic relationships. I want to say something now about the message of hope, peace, because ultimately for survival, all of us must choose to get away from toxic relationships. For our country’s safety, in the presence of a pandemic, and all of the other crises that happen, we must have a leader, Democrat or Republican, who has compassion, who can step outside themselves and see the needs of others.

  Donald Trump is profoundly lacking, is incapable of doing that. That’s why we can directly attribute the deaths of so many people to his refusal of putting the public health above his image and his needs. This is a terrible thing and the loss associated with that. I’m not talking about so many other ways in which this is true. The immigrant children ripped out of their parents’ arms, Black Lives Matter, and his complete refusal to see the worth and validity of that and to face our country’s racism, his support of white supremacists so much here in so many different areas. I’ve written a number of pieces for Psychology Today about this.

A Time For Hope

For this episode, I’m speaking mostly about Coronavirus. I do want to say something about hope. The beautiful bravery of changing direction when we see truth, the ability to do what a narcissist cannot do, which is de-center from our own agenda, and open our hearts to the humanity of what’s going on. All of us now have the opportunity to do that on a multitude of levels. We can see how the power of narcissism is playing out in our country and literally leading to death to a country lost, blind, and bewildered because its leadership is not saying we’re directly and wisely going to tackle this pandemic. We must get away from this administration’s narcissistic and toxic response to crisis. I’m a Democrat, but this is not about Democrat or Republican. This is about character. This is a message that also applies in our personal lives, for all of us who are stuck in relationships and so many of us know this experience where we are repeatedly, even if it’s not this extreme, even if it’s not at all about what leads to death. The experience of being in a relationship where we don’t feel seen, where we don’t feel cherished, where we don’t have license to be all that we are. The damage that that creates, the damage that creates for us, for our children, and for our loved ones. It’s such an act of bravery to open our eyes, to douse the hypnosis, and to face the reality of what’s going on and to say yes to compassion for ourselves, to say yes to compassion for all the people that are being wounded by a narcissist’s toxic, rage, and behaviors. This is a time for hope. This is a time where all of us can say, “We need a leader who cares. We need a leader who is compassionate.” We are in the midst of a pandemic. We need to take care of what needs to be taken care of. It’s not something a narcissist can do. I know that this is such a political message, but as a human being in this world, I feel that I must stand up when unnecessary deaths are being caused by narcissism, just as I stand up for the same thing in all of my talks about attractions of deprivation. Even after, God willing, this election, assuming Trump does not win again, because if he does, much more horror, horror born of a lack of compassion, will occur. Even after, even if we don’t have Trump as president again, there will be a period of healing that needs to happen. Wounds around race have been ripped up. Racism has been allowed to flourish and to gain fire. This pandemic has gained so much fuel because of Trump and his administration’s refusal to honor the reality of what’s going on. This is hard to refute. There’s a lot of healing that needs to happen. For all of us who have been in a relationship with a narcissist, there’s so much healing that needs to happen even when we get away from that relationship. It’s hard and it’s difficult because we’ve allowed such wrong things to happen, to ourselves and to other people, and because we’ve gotten into such a kind of channel of pain and suffering and diminishment of compassion. All of us as a nation are going to have to heal when we make this choice to move away from abuse, to move away from narcissism, in our lives, in our relationship, and in our president. Thank you so much for listening. I know this was a controversial episode, but we must speak the truth when it comes to the wellbeing of those around us. Thanks so much for listening. I’ll see you in two weeks on the next episode of the Deeper Dating Podcast.

Important Links:

• Deeper Dating 
• Donald Trump 
• How your personality changes after surviving narcissistic abuse 
• Hara Marano 
• Psychology Today 

Table of Contents

• Choosing Partners
• The Color Of Love
• Same Sex Relationships
• An Anxious Couple
• Digital Honesty

Watch the episode here:

Deeper Dating Q&A: Expert Advice For All Your Questions About Love, Dating And Sex

Your Questions Answered By Ken

Today’s episode is the Deeper Dating Q&A, where I answer your most pressing personal questions about love, sex, and intimacy. You’ll leave this episode with new possibilities and hopefully, some important revelations about your own love life. Stay tuned to the Deeper Dating Podcast. — Hi, everybody and welcome to the Deeper Dating podcast. I’m Ken Page, and I’m a psychotherapist, the author of the book, Deeper Dating and the Cofounder of DeeperDating.com. I’m excited to be with you here today when I answer your questions about love, romance, and intimacy. This week, and every week, I’m going to share with you the greatest tools that I know to help you find love and keep it alive and if you want to learn more about this approach, just go to DeeperDatingPodcast.com. You can get some free gifts there and you can join my mailing list as well. Today, I have gotten some really wonderful questions, and I’ve gotten a lot of questions too. I’m thrilled about this. A ton of people wrote questions or recorded questions, and any of you can do that as well by just going to DeeperDatingPodcast.com and then you click on Ask Ken, and you can leave me any question that you want. I’m thrilled about all the different questions, and I think they have some basic themes around communicating about difficult things, but I’m super excited to dive in, in one moment. I just need to tell you one thing, a little bit of news about the podcast, which is, I am, unfortunately, or fortunately going to need to move the podcast to be every two weeks for a period of time instead of every week. I’m devoting myself, kind of heart and soul, to this new platform called DeeperDating.com, which is a way to help single people meet in a way that’s respectful, thoughtful, fun, reflective, and kind of follows the values that I really try to teach here of kindness, connection and authenticity. I’m super excited about that. Please visit DeeperDating.com. Join our mailing list. We are starting to have events now, in all different parts of the country we are just beginning to grow, but I’m devoting myself to that. I’m kind of trying to, as they say, “To write is human to edit is divine.”

Choosing Partners

I think to do is human and to edit one’s doing is divine and very hard for me as a workaholic, but I am going to be still doing the podcast, but just once every two weeks now, at least for a period of time, as I help DeeperDating.com come into life in the world. Thank you for understanding that. Let me jump right now into the questions. I’m going to answer these a little bit more quickly than I usually do because there are so many questions that I’ve gotten. The first one is from my friend, Maria Elena from Mexico, and Maria Elena asked it’s a wonderful question. She said, “I have a really strong personality and I have been attracted to, and I attract men who also have really strong personalities and characters. These relationships have ended quickly and have not done well. Should I instead be looking for somebody with a gentler nature because I have a really strong personality has an easier lighter personality who can accommodate me so that we’re not kind of butting heads together?” That was her question. I’m going to answer this question, but I also just want to encourage, I’d love there to be a kind of crowdsourcing thing, because I think that I can kind of come up with little chunks of wisdom or insight that might be really important and sometimes a really central, and sometimes they’re not as central. In my groups, in my intensives, I’ll share things and then, other people will share things that hit at the heart of things better than I could have. If anything you hear in terms of my answers or anybody else’s question inspires you to give a different response or a different angle, I’d always appreciate that and you can just go to, again, DeeperDatingPodcast.com, click Ask Ken, and share your perspectives. I can try to pass those on where it’s possible to do that. My thought about this is that, if two people with a really strong personality come together, there definitely is room for a particular kind of greater conflict, but I think that if a stronger person and a more passive person come together, there’s also room for more of that difficulty. If two people with really strong personalities come together, there definitely is room for a particular kind of greater conflict.CLICK TO TWEETI personally think, ultimately, it’s about the skills of intimacy, more than anything else, because sometimes, really different even conflicting styles can be exciting and can add a sense of life and variety if both partners are willing to learn the other person’s language of being, and style of being. I think It’s more about communication skills. You’ve got a strong opinion, your partner has a strong opinion, how can you both hold that together as the couple that you are and talk about it, work it through and express what’s going on? I think it’s more about communication than particular kind of character styles. Although obviously, different character styles are going to create a different recipe for a relationship, but I really do think ultimately, if a person is not abusive, if you are not abusive, that it’s just so much more about learning the kind of like deeper, basic communication skills. Thank you, Maria Elena, for asking that question. Next, Jordan asks a question. Jordan is working on the Deeper Dating book and is in chapter two and that’s fabulous. Those are really rich chapters and has met somebody wonderful. The connection is great, the physical sexual connection is great. She feels comfortable in her own skin with this person more than she ever has since she’s been eighteen years old. These are all wonderful things and I just love hearing that. I’m thrilled that you are leading with who you are and you found somebody with whom you can be who you are and she says, the communication is great. Recently though, she has left some texts and not gotten responses to them and that’s really scary because her experience in the past has also been with guys who are cheating on her and who she believes that are in a monogamous relationship with her but in fact, they’re cheating on her. These kinds of like dropped texts are a real sign of that. It’s very scary and Jordan feels like she’s going to talk to him about this whole issue of monogamy because that’s what she wants and she just asked for some advice on how to do that. First of all, I just want to say you if are with someone with whom you can communicate and whom you feel so good with those are signs in all probability of deep growth on your part. What I would say in the simplest terms is that you do need to talk to him and you can share that there has been trauma and wounding for you. It’s a funny point that you’re at because Jordan says they’d been on a handful of dates, I figured maybe like 4 maybe 5 dates, something like that. Feelings can really be growing deeply at that point, but it’s kind of early to say we are going to absolutely move to monogamy in some cases because some people who might and will be ultimately available, aren’t ready to say that yet, after just that many dates. I think one question there is, is this a shared commitment? Is this something that he believes in, is looking for, and aspires to? Does he feel like that is a direction that he sees this possibly going in so that there’s space for him as well? You can share, and there needs to be room for the fact that this is scary and difficult for you and then continue the conversation from there.

The Color Of Love

I think that you might actually become closer as you have that conversation, but I also want to really encourage you because you have trauma there, and kind of a hallmark of trauma is black and white thinking. It’s easy to go to the biggest fears and that’s not something he necessarily needs to be responsible for in the communication. I say, if you have dear friends who honor your commitment to monogamy and are spacious and nonjudgmental, talk to them and get support to help you be able to really talk to him from an open space. I’m excited for you and let us know what happens. Next question or request, Lou left a message and thanked me for the podcast and the work that I’m doing and asked if I would reflect on kind of some of the issues of what it is like for people of color, to face the institutionalized racism that they experienced so often in online dating?   Thank you so much for this question, Lou. I have a number of thoughts that I want to share. As a white person who has not directly experienced this, but has certainly experienced a lot of other kinds of oppression and prejudice, I’m just going to speak from my heart about some of the things that I’ve seen and I’ve been touched by and I’m aware of. Somehow the impersonality of online dating and the objectification that happens so much in online dating allows people to be more cruel than they would normally be and allows for blatant racism under the guise of, “This is just who I’m sexually attracted to.” Microaggressions direct ugliness. Even though the research shows that there’s more, there are more interracial couples now as a result of how online dating mixes things up and mixes people up and blends worlds in different ways there is also just a huge amount of institutionalized racism. There’s very poignant research that shows directly how facing this kind of racism in online dating leads to feelings of low self-worth, depression, and anxiety, which makes perfect sense because the desire for a loving partner and wanting to be included in the world and connected in that way and connected with someone goes so deep. It’s so profound that a shut door in our face an institutionalized shut door in our face, it causes pain on so many different levels. There was a New York Times modern love column called Trying to Feel Love-Worthy (While Working for a Dating App), by Loré Yessuff in July 2020, that was so poignant to me and it speaks to this and I just would love to read just some of the things that she wrote. She describes herself as having this job opportunity of getting to work in customer service for an online dating site. She says, “I was a recent college graduate, recovering from a breakup, longing to be with someone who didn’t want to commit to me. It was my first breakup but as a black woman, I was not new to heartache. This pain felt familiar. The symptoms are easy to decipher. It always starts in the throat, hums in the chest, and drops to the lowest point of the belly, sharp, thick burning. The first time I felt it was in second grade on the school bus when two white boys screeched at me saying I was ugly while tugging on my newly plaited braids. I was so shocked that I froze waiting for the mockery to end. Far too many black women are taught that romantic fantasies do not belong to us, that we are never someone’s 1st, 2nd, or 3rd choice and that we should feel lucky if we are wanted, which really means that we should feel suspicious.” This is a beautiful piece and it continued and it talked about some research that showed that black women are among the least likely the ones, who were going to among those who received the least attention of any category on dating apps. Another group is Asian men. This led me to kind of look into the research on this, and it’s been fascinating and painful to see how institutionalized racism like, for example, race filtering, searching and filtering under race is so prevalent. How some algorithms of dating sites actually assume without being told that people are more interested in people of the same race? Online dating, I believe can be used as a vehicle for healing and communication in some ways, some powerful ways and it can also be used as a tool to harden and further the toxicity of racism.

Same Sex Relationships

As someone who’s creating an online dating site, this is something that feels deeply, deeply important for me to be a part of the healing process in that. Please, look forward to an upcoming panel where I’m going to bring together participants, researchers, people of color who use the sites, and just a kind of group of people to really talk about this. I used to do a lot of workshops for a group of a wonderful group called Men of All Colors Together, where people of all different races would get together and it was a place where people could meet romantically, but also could converse and heal. It was just a beautiful, beautiful group and I wish that online dating could actually allow for that kind of healing. I believe that there are ways that it can. Lou, I’m so appreciative of your question and I just want to honor kind of the pain  and the ruefor so many people who experience those closed doors in a place that is so tender and matters so much. The next question was a beautiful question from a woman who is doing the deeper dating process. She says, she’s on stage two in the four stages of this journey, the first stage is a discovery of your core gifts, your kind of deepest sensitivities and passions. You’re inner-most self and learning to honor that. The second stage is understanding attraction patterns more deeply, and getting a deeper sense of making choices to only pursue what I call attractions of inspiration versus attractions of deprivation. The third stage is the getting out there in a way where you lead with your authenticity and only choose people who resonate with that and make you feel safe inside. The fourth stage is the rewiring that has to happen when we meet somebody where it’s a healthier relationship. Anyway, this woman says that she’s in stage two and doesn’t feel like so ready to meet people because she’s been in bad relationships before, she’s gay. A hallmark of trauma is black and white thinking.CLICK TO TWEETShe met a woman recently who seemed like her type, and she’s noticing that a part of her is feeling like, “I don’t want to lose this opportunity.” Another part is saying, “I don’t want to jump in again. I don’t want to get hurt again. I also don’t know if this woman is a lesbian or if she’s straight. That’s kind of scary too. How do I know what to do? I want to honor this part of me that wants to protect myself and let my growth happen and don’t get lost in relationships again but I also don’t want to lose an opportunity?” This is a fabulous, fabulous question, just some thoughts that I have here are big question, I think are the signs of the person’s actual character. One thing is you are going to have to find out like pretty soon, if this person is attracted to women, also. You will need to do that, it’s scary, but you’ll need to do that and that will be a good thing because then you’ll know. You shouldn’t wait too long – so many people wait so long with that, just because of internalized homophobia, shyness, and timidity. I want to encourage you not to do that. The other thing is, I think that you should get to know who this person is and make the decision not based on any abstractions, but based on who she is and how she acts – her character. Is there decency? Is there goodness? Is there kindness? Is there authenticity? Are those things consistent or pretty consistent? If the answers to those things are yes, then at least this person could be a friend, but I think that it’s like kind of being in a dark room and not knowing where the furniture is and you don’t want to walk into the room and bang yourself up. I think it’s important to go  in carefully and ask yourself the question again and again, “Does my soul feel safe with this person?” Notice the feelings of safety or unsafety that resonate for you and you’ll often know the difference between what’s fear and what’s actually a sense of what doesn’t feel safe. The more you practice this, the more you will know that. Good luck, be brave, and this growing desire to honor yourself, that’s almost coming before anything else. I hear that loud and clear and it’s wonderful. A fabulous question from Miriam who said, “I’m an activist and that’s really important to me. That’s very central to my value system and I really feel like I want to be with someone else who is also an activist, is that fear-based or is that just a kind of honoring of who I am? What my values are and what matters to me?” I love this question and it’s actually a question that I’ve heard other times as well and here’s what I would say. You totally have to start out by treasuring this and realizing that being with someone who  is an activist would be wonderful and celebrate that, absolutely. I’m going to make a jump to this, how do you find that online? Because that was another thing she said is, how do you find that? You use filters with sophistication, you figure out the keywords, activism, ecology, Black Lives Matter, anti-racism, homophobia, whatever keywords, like get a whole bunch of them and look for, do searches for people who have those words in their profile. You can also go to Facebook groups and find groups that have lots of members that also share those same values. I say, go for that, treasure it, it’s wonderful and it’s fabulous. I would also say though, that there are different kinds of activism. There are people who are quiet activists, people who you see them be honest, and be kind when it’s really hard, to be honest, and kind, and that’s a kind of activism.

An Anxious Couple

I am not saying that to steer you away from knowing that you’d love to be with someone who’s an activist, but I am saying that the world surprises us with who we meet. The basic values of bravery, expression, protection of other people, etc, are really the deepest values of activism. I would say in that way, allow yourself to be surprised. Next, Dinah is 67 and has met a really wonderful guy. She is thrilled. She is very appreciative of this work and she’s so excited because this guy is wonderful and they can really communicate. She’s just so happy about the relationship, but she had a few concerns. One concern is that she has an anxious attachment style, so does he. When he gets kind of anxious, she experiences him as clingy, and then she pulls away, that was one piece, but she said, “We talk about it and that’s what really matters. We kind of like work it through and address it.” That’s what I would say is that’s the key, the question, outside of situations of abuse or unstabilized, serious psychiatric disorders. I think that the ability for a couple to hold differences, difficulties, ambivalence, and talk about it with openness, kindness, and care is the heart and the soul of a great relationship. It sounds like you have that heart and soul of a great relationship. What I think is, what I would say is that when you feel the clinginess and you feel that desire to avoid, questions are, how can you take care of yourself? When we feel suffocated or when we feel another person is not kind of able to hold up their own weight and we have a kind of primal fear reaction, or we just want to pull away, it’s often easy to beat ourselves up for that, “I can’t love, I’m not capable of loving. Why am I not more steady in my attraction or connection?” We need first to make space, “I feel kind of like this person is being clingy, what kind of space do I need? How much space do I need so that I could still say close, but feel like I could breathe? What kind of connection do we need now so that I don’t get lost in this? What do I need? What do I think he needs?” The minute we can take the time to ask ourselves those questions, and then you will get answers. You will get ideas and you will get insights if you can hold that dilemma with that kind of respect and gentleness. When you get those insights, then you find a way to share them and you do it in a way that’s kind, in a way that honors you and honors the other person. These are going to be the issues that the two of you if you stay together are going to have forever. What you’re doing is building language bridges between your different styles of being, or in this case, your similar styles of being. That’s my thought there.  

Digital Honesty

The other thing that she asked is she said, “He has some real health concerns. We’re both kind of a little bit older and that’s a risk because I’m really active and I want to live a really rich, good life and that concerns me too.” What I would say about that is, that is such a deeply personal existential question, let the bond keep growing and let it grow, let it grow. As it grows, you will come closer to knowing what your decision is and what’s going to be right for you. That’s so dependent on so many factors, but you just want to know that if it’s not going to work, you didn’t leave out of fear. It sounds like there’s so much good here, it sounds like the preponderance of good is huge in this case. Mostly I would say have fun, including learning to have fun with some of the difficult communication stuff. The next question is from Joanne, and Joanne, thank you for your kind words about my book. Joanne was saying that, that she has been meeting some people and they haven’t been ready to speak on the phone or on video. They’re happy to message. They do  do video with their family, but they’re not ready to do video or phone with her. She says, “I don’t mind waiting a few weeks. I don’t even mind necessarily waiting a month, but longer than that, I begin to wonder if they’re being honest with me about who they are.” I would say to you, I agree. I think that’s, you know, over a month of refusing to speak on the phone or on video, using reasons like, “I’ve got difficult things going on, or I’m not feeling well.” Those do sound like excuses to me if we’re talking about over a month. I say, trust your intuition, but speak to the person and be really direct and ask them for greater clarity and tell them that this is uncomfortable for you. You could ask them when they will be ready to do this, or you could say to them, “This is something that at this point I need to be able to do.” I think you have a right to, because that’s a really, really long time not to be doing that. Especially, for people who do that regularly with their family. I’d say probably your sense of concern is valid but once again, I guess that’s kind of the message of this episode, speak to them, tell them really what you’re feeling, and then take it from there. Thank you. I still have a number of questions that people have asked that I didn’t get to, and I won’t be able to get to in this episode. I’m not going to wait for my normal four-plus weeks to do my next Q&A. It’s going to be much sooner than that. Those of you who didn’t get your questions answered, I’m going to do my best to do that in the next Q&A episode. What I would like to ask you to do now, is to think for a moment since this kind of a theme of talking about the hard stuff has been such a rich theme of this episode, where for you in a relationship, might there be a place where something’s difficult to talk about but could be talked about with the person who is good and decent and listens to you and where there’s that kind of safe relationship. Just take a minute. I think we all have a place where we could say, “I could say something more here. There’s something I haven’t talked about that I feel that’s sitting in my heart.” Of course, those things overall, really do bring us closer, although they may be difficult and they may not just be one single conversation. Take a moment to think about that and I encourage you to give that a shot, do a field trip, an honesty, authenticity field trip, where you get to share that. Again, my apologies to all the people that I didn’t get to yet, I will hopefully get to you pretty soon. Thank you all for listening and I look forward to speaking with you on the next episode of the Deeper Dating Podcast.

Table of Contents

• What Is Enlightened Audacity
• Bravery And Intimacy
• Expressing Kindness And Generosity
• Showing Vulnerability
• Owning Our Originality

Watch the episode here:

Enlightened Audacity: The Key To Heart-Filling Intimacy

Discovering The Magic Blend Of Authenticity And Compassion

Enlightened audacity is one of the most exciting, delicious, and powerful intimacy tools that exist. Stay tuned to this episode of the Deeper Dating Podcast to learn this skill, so that you can use it to transform your relationships in powerful and wonderful ways. — Hello, everybody, and welcome to the Deeper Dating Podcast. I’m Ken Page. I’m so glad to be here with you. I’m a psychotherapist and the author of the bestselling book, Deeper Dating and I’m the Cofounder of DeeperDating.com, a new way for single people to meet online that’s warm, and fun, and inspiring, and focused on creating healthy, positive relationships. Today, I’m going to talk about enlightened audacity. One of the most wonderful, powerful, and liberating tools I know for anybody who wants deeper intimacy in their lives. If you want to learn more about the deeper dating approach to intimacy, just go to DeeperDatingPodcast.com.

What Is Enlightened Audacity

We’re going to jump right in. Enlightened audacity is maybe the greatest skill that we can learn in love, and enlightened audacity is being brave enough to present the authentic version of who you are, not the airbrushed one, and then to take the time and the care to do it in a way that honors the humanity of whomever we’re interacting with. Enlightened audacity starts with kindness to ourselves by feeling our humanity, our ambivalence, whatever it is that we’re feeling and experiencing in our bodies, our hearts, and our minds, even if we don’t know how to handle it, or it scares us, or it confuses us. When we begin with kindness to our humanity, our inner world begins to light up. Then we think about expressing whatever it is that we want to express, our needs, our experience, to the other person. The rules in this step are beautifully and simply expressed in the Al-Anon slogan, “Say what you mean. Mean what you say and don’t say it mean.” When we’re authentic like that, it creates honesty waves that enter into the very being of the person we’re talking to. People register that kind of truth. It’s gritty, it’s real, it’s human, and it evokes trust when we do it in kind ways. Everyone is defended against manipulation, but simple truth with the ring of our heart in it passes through the barriers of defensiveness and resistance that the other person has. When we begin with kindness to our humanity, our inner world begins to light up.CLICK TO TWEETEvery act of enlightened audacity that you do brings the exhilaration of honesty and the closeness that kindness fosters, and those two together are magnificence. Doing this is a kind of sacred intimacy act that changes our inner state, and it enlivens us, and it makes us radically open to greater intimacy. Enlightened audacity helps us ask for what we need, helps us express appreciation to other people, and to share our authentic selves with the people who deserve it. Also, amazingly, the commitment to live in a state of enlightened audacity turns down the volume on our fear of rejection. I want to talk about five different ways to practice enlightened audacity. Some of these might feel really natural to you. You might say, “I’m doing these already.” That’s cause for celebration and some might feel a little harder, a little scarier, a little more raw, a little more of a sense of, “I need to work on that one.” Just as I said, there’s just nothing like the experience of honesty and kindness, and having the ripples of that state met and mirrored by another person. That’s a kind of perfect joy.

Bravery And Intimacy

I want to talk about bravery first. I think that bravery is one of the great skills of relationship. It’s one of the great skills of life, and it’s one of the great skills of dating too. For many of us, it’s the biggest fear of all. In the realm of dating, letting somebody know that we’re interested in them, it’s like building a muscle. We get better at it, but it is hard and it’s hard at first. There’s like an intense vulnerability to that and often, it almost feels like we’re weakening ourselves by letting somebody know that we like them, but we’re not weakening ourselves. We are making ourselves vulnerable. Another way to look at that is that we’re being generous. We’re giving the other person a gift, and the sensitivity and the decency of their reaction is going to tell us so much about who they are. It takes so much bravery to get out there and meet people. It takes courage to let your family and your friends know that you’re looking to meet someone, and to ask them for help, and it takes courage when we’re stuck in a new relationship or stuck in an old pattern to say, “I need help.” These are acts that change our world. They up us to an entirely different platform than trying to make those changes in our heads. When we interact with the world from this place of enlightened audacity, we kind of change the fabric of our lives.

  If you could just take a minute and think about a time that you were honest, really honest with someone, and you did it in a way that was kind and caring, but it was really honest, and how that felt, the scariness of it, but also the love of it by doing it in a way that was kind and caring, and making space. Just remember that feeling of truth and kindness together, how completely awesome that feels. It opens the door to a kind of floodgate of goodness, sexuality, desire, and connectedness when we do that with someone who is a safe person. It’s such a risk to do that though. I remember I took a workshop in trapeze work. I remember climbing up this wobbly little ladder and like I got to the top there, and the trapeze came and I had to jump. There was a beautiful, big, strong net underneath me, so I knew I wouldn’t be hurt, but that experience of jumping into space to grab the trapeze was like pure inky terror. It was just pure dark terror. It was pure terror, but then the experience of grabbing it and holding onto it was very exhilarating, even though I fell off in about a minute, but it was still a joy. That experience when I think of someone doing trapeze work who really knows what they’re doing, that experience of leaping into space, and someone else coming, and knowing that when you leap into space, their arms are going to catch you. What an amazing experience that is, but when we take the step to be vulnerable, extra vulnerable, scary, truthful vulnerable to someone, it’s like that. It’s like letting go of the trapeze, and when that person catches us, that’s just a grand and wonderful kind of intimacy. It’s a cement of bond and the experience of being with someone who can do that with you is just glorious. That’s the result of enlightened audacity with a safe person. Gandhi said a wonderful quote. He said, “Love is the prerogative of the brave,” and it’s so true. It takes true bravery to share who we really are with a loved one, first with ourselves, but every time we do it, we become a little stronger. We become more inspired and we become a bit more willing to live in the world as we really are, and I think that in this process of achieving enlightened audacity, the first step is that bravery to say, “What’s my truth?” To actually allow ourselves to put our hands around the insights, the experience, the truth, and the way of experiencing the world that we truly do, and that is scary because the voices say, “You’re going to get in trouble. You won’t be loved. You won’t be accepted.” So much so that it’s hard to grab on to the truth of what we’re experiencing. It takes true bravery to share who we really are with a loved oneCLICK TO TWEET

Expressing Kindness And Generosity

That’s the first foundational stage of intimacy and bravery. It’s being able to say, “What is it that I’m thinking? What is it that I’m feeling?” That act is an act of personal greatness. It’s a first step act that is just huge. Then the next step is to express that and to take the rawness, the realness of what we’re experiencing, to make that commitment that we’re going to own it. We’re going to own it and love it as our incomplete evolving truth, but our experience of truth at the moment, and then to take that and think about, “How do I express this in a way that sees the humanity of the other person?” Let me back up and think about what they have been trying to tell me, about what their needs are, their feelings are, their sensitivities are. What it’s like to be inside their world now, and not to let that stop us from claiming and expressing our truth in the right way at the right time, but being able to hold that in such a way that we can frame and craft what we want to say with that kind of kindness, caring, and cherishing. In dating, we’ve been taught to be cool and not kind. It’s like the modern dating call is “NEXT”, and if dating culture is anything, it is unkind, and we’ve become so used to it. I’ve talked about this a bunch before, but with the multitudes of people that we meet online, we’ve lost some basic codes of kindness that actually create the possibility of healthy intimacy. That cold approach has dead ended countless potential good relationships, and it’s led to a singles culture that is filled with deep loneliness, which is part of why we created Deeper Dating. It is scary to show an extra degree of kindness and generosity. It exposes our soul to do that, and then in an interaction with someone where what we’re feeling, experiencing, and needing goes against what they are, we often come in in a kind of aggressive way for a good reason, and the reason is that’s what we feel like it takes to protect our truth, but actually, when we can hold our truth in ourselves, we can do it in a much gentler way of, “We’ve made the intention and the commitment to honor that truth no matter what,” then we can come in in a way that’s a lot more gentle. How the other person responds to our kindness and gentleness tells us worlds about who they are, and if they’re someone we want in our world. This leads us to meet kinder people, and people who are capable of long-term, healthy love. Kindness and generosity are intoxicating to people, and they’re the medium of intimacy. There’s this kind of awkward vulnerability that we experience when we express this kindness, this generosity. It leaves us feeling kind of raw and vulnerable, and our culture has cut out so many opportunities for settled kindness due to the pace of our interactions. Current dating advice is all about confidence and carefully modulated, crafted ways of writing your profile, flirting, and interacting with people, keeping the other person guessing, but really, it’s kindness that spawns love.

 

Showing Vulnerability

Another is showing vulnerability, because at our core, we’re not only strong, we are tender. All of us are breathtakingly tender. We’re sensitive in the deepest ways, and life teaches us really quickly that we need to toughen up, but we all know that the more authentic we get, the more we feel our tender soul, and that’s where our life is. In a world like this, that’s scary. We’re afraid of showing and feeling our tenderness, our sexual passion, our care. Letting somebody know when we need to be held, how hard is that for so many of us? Letting people know when we need to be listened to even more deeply when we’re feeling insecure, it’s so hard to do those things. It’s not wise to do those things with people that are going to gaslight you, or criticize you, or cut into you. It is wise to practice that bravery with those precious people who cherish you and are going to show that. When we feel blocked in our lives, or when a dating relationship or romantic relationship becomes stale or stuck, it is because we have chosen not to be as vulnerable, not to be as authentic, not to be as truthful as we could be. Psychotherapists know that when we’re in session with a client, and all of a sudden, out of nowhere, we get hit by this wave of deep tiredness and exhaustion, like all of a sudden, it becomes hard to keep our eyes open. We know that there is something we are not speaking or something our client is not speaking, and it creates this staleness that when you experience that as a therapist, you often ask yourself, “What’s not being said? What’s not being shared? What am I afraid to share that is in fact, all of a sudden, hitting me with this supernatural wave of tiredness?”

Owning Our Originality

It’s one of the amazing experiences that we can use as therapists to understand that there’s a secret in the room. That there’s a lack of energy because there’s a lack of truth around something. Another one is our originality, and originality is scary. Even with our human similarities, every one of us is a completely unique creation and as much as we share a language, we all have our own language of what love is, of what we see the world to be, and that uniqueness is terrifying. That is the uniqueness that artists brave every time they try to tell their truth through their creativity. On some level, we’re herd animals, and when we express parts of ourselves that make us feel different, it feels like we’re straying too far from the pack. We get scared. “Will I end up alone? Am I so different that no one’s going to want me?” As we go deeper into our authentic self, and we feel that fear, we learn the importance of cultivating our tribe. Those people with whom when we share these parts of ourselves, they look at us and we could tell that they get it, and those people are our home in the world. They are our tribe. All of us can think of moments when we have been afraid to share, afraid to share our deepest thoughts, or questions, or insights with someone that we care about. On a date, we curb our originality so that people don’t judge us as being odd, or there’s a piece of art that we want to share, or words that we want to put down or speak, and they scare us because they’re so charged, and we know we could get in trouble by expressing those truths. These are so human, and this is the exhilarating state of enlightened audacity. It’s making the choice to express these parts, and having the enlightenment to do it in ways that are kind, if it’s in an interaction with someone, and in ways that are discriminating. That’s the enlightened part, that we do it with people who can get it, that we search for people who can get it, that we know that there are people in this world who are going to love the language of our souls. It is kindness that spawns love.CLICK TO TWEETI think we’re afraid of our passion too. We’re scared, and I raise my hand for all of these. Everything I’m talking about today, I’m talking about because I’ve seen it in clients. I’ve seen it in the world, and I live it in myself most days of the week. Most of us are also scared of the depth of our love. I say this to my husband. I say, “My biggest secret is how deeply I love you.” It scares me to say that. It makes me feel so vulnerable. How powerful our anger can be… How fierce our hunger, how burning that need plays, how huge our love, how fierce our protectiveness for the people we love. I think we’re all scared of our power. Scared because we feel like it’s going to frighten other people, or maybe people have misused power on us, or we’ve seen it done so often, and we don’t want to do it to someone else. The Icarus’ image is so powerful. If we fly too high, if we get too close to the burning sun of our soul, our wings are going to melt and we’ll come crashing down. We’re afraid of showing the intensity of our power as equally as we’re afraid of showing the tenderness of our sensitivity. Before we close, I just want to lead you in a quick micro-meditation, and as always, you can do this, you can close your eyes and take time to just really go into this, or if you’re walking or driving, keep your eyes open and you can just kind of do this in your head as you’re listening. Have you ever had an experience where you said something that was really difficult to say, either positive or negative, and you did it with an open heart in a non-defensive way to somebody who heard it, and appreciated it, and responded positively? Have you ever had that experience? If you haven’t, just imagine what that would be like because my hope is that that’s going to be in your future. If you have, just remember what it was like taking that scary step, and then also, what it was like to kind of like own your truth but then express it with kindness. With kind of, as I talk about, cupped hands, with the cherishing of the humanity of the other person. What did that alchemy feel like inside of you? That bravery and that love mixed together. Just remember that. Then what it felt like when what you said was met with caring, appreciation, being heard, decency, humanity. Remember that maybe you felt warmth or gratification mixed with adrenaline or all those different things. Just take a moment to remember what that felt like. This glorious and earned alchemical feeling. These are some of the feelings of enlightened audacity. Just take a moment, remember that experience, and also acknowledge yourself for your bravery, your kindness, and your vulnerability in that experience, and just rest with that memory, and picture a life where you are with people with whom you can do that more, and with whom you do do that more. That’s the stuff of intimacy. That’s the stuff of happiness. That’s the kind of brick and mortar of building a life that’s full of love. Thank you all for listening. I invite you to go to DeeperDatingPodcast.com to join my mailing list, to leave me a review, to subscribe, all those good things if what I talked about spoke to you. Good luck and enjoy your adventure of living enlightened audacity in your own life. Thank you.

Table of Contents

• Deadly Advice
• Be Confident
• Instrumentality and Expressiveness

The 5 Toxic Dating Myths Everyone Needs to Reject

There are five myths about finding love that people tell us all the time we need to believe, but they actually damage us and lead us away from love. It leads us away from a truth that is actually much more empowering, healing and hopeful. Stay tuned to this episode of the Deeper Dating Podcast to learn more. — Hi, everybody and welcome to the Deeper Dating Podcast. I’m Ken Page. I’m a psychotherapist and the author of the book Deeper Dating, the Cofounder of the meeting event, Deeper Dating, and the host of this show. Today, I’m going to talk about five incredibly toxic dating myths that we all get taught and most of us believe and cause huge amounts of pain and misdirection in our search for love. This week and every week, I’m going to share the greatest tools that I know to help you find love, keep it flourishing, and heal your life in the process because truly, the skills of dating are the skills of intimacy. Those are the greatest skills of all for a rich and wonderful life. If you want to learn more about the deeper dating approach to finding love, just go to DeeperDatingPodcast.com. You can join my mailing list. You can get transcripts of every episode and find out about a lot of different resources and get some free gifts too. Our attractions are more than just attractions. They are x-rays into the shape of our being.CLICK TO TWEETI also just want to say that everything I share in this podcast is educational in nature. It is not medical or psychiatric advice. If you have symptoms that are concerning you, please seek professional help. Finally, I would love it if you could leave a review if you could subscribe. Your reviews mean the world to me and people write beautiful, powerful, very personal, and specific things and that just meant a great deal to me and also helps other people find out about the show. Okay, so let’s dive in.

Deadly Advice

So often in my field, when I listen to people’s dating advice, God knows not everyone, but so many people’s dating advice. I just cringe because I’m aware that this advice is enacting a kind of violence against people’s spirits that lead them to love themselves less and ultimately end up having them being attracted to and choosing people who aren’t good for them because they’re not being their authentic self. This advice is in so many ways endemic. It’s all over the place. I’m going to talk about five myths that we have been trained to believe that actually cause a kind of psychic violence in our being and don’t lead to love. They lead to desperation. They lead to insecurity and they lead to artificial behavior that ends up getting us in trouble. I think I’ve talked about this before, but Frédérick Leboyer, was a French obstetrician and author, who wrote a book called Birth without Violence. In it, he popularized gentle birthing techniques that did not involve slapping a baby or having the baby’s first breath be a cry. He would immerse the baby in water, the exact temperature that was in the mother’s womb, and let the baby somehow come to breathing on its own. The faces of these babies who are immersed in water, obviously not their faces, but their bodies are immersed in water and they’re being stroked. The umbilical cord is still attached and they take their first breath naturally. Their faces are so beautiful and Buddha-like. There are videos of this.

He promoted birth without violence and what I’m kind of promoting here is dating without violence. I’m going to talk about each of these different myths and I’m going to talk about why they’re not true and what I think is both true and healing in their place. Here’s the first one, and this is what I’ve spoken about before, but it is that it’s all about your attractiveness, not about your attractions. The key thing that you can do to find love looks better, look more attractive and act more attractive. This is, I would say the mother lode in terms of dating advice. This is where so much dating advice spends its time and energy. There is this relentless fixation on making yourself look smoking hot. Absolutely, it is true that if you look smoking hot, more people are going to look at you. More people are going to want to have sex with you. More people might want to have a first date with you. All these things are true, but the statistics show that being smoking, smoking hot helps you just about not one drop in finding healthy, lasting love. I think we all know that people who are just exceedingly gorgeous-looking often have their own set of problems and in fact, the research shows, it’s often harder for them to find love. Even loving off those people who are just, you know, model-like gorgeous this fixation on those 5 pounds or 10 pounds or 30 pounds or 50 pounds or ways of acting that will seduce people. We’re going to get to that one later, but this fixation on our attractiveness and God knows I was eaten alive by that. This information kind of chews us up in our 20s, 30s, even in our 40s and then just starts to spit us out when we reach our 50s and 60s and thereafter. This kind of tyrannical focus on how we look is just not true and I say this based on research. I say it on experience, my own personal experience because there was a period where I looked pretty smoking hot, I think. I worked on that really hard in my 20s and early 30s and it helped me not one drop. It helped me a lot to have sex. Yes, it did, but it helped me not one drop to find love because that’s not what really leads to love. This focus, this relentless focus on our attractiveness really just does eat us up and misses the point in profound ways. I also want to say, well, first of all, it is great to make yourself look attractive. It’s an act of love to yourself. It’s a pleasurable experience. It is a gift to the person you date and research also shows that just the act of grooming yourself well and having good posture dramatically does improve your chance of being noticed. All of the other stuff of like kind of really getting to that extra unbelievable level, the effectiveness of that actually levels off. Good posture and good grooming take up a huge amount of space in terms of success around attractiveness but after that, and in addition to that, what we really need to focus on if we want to find happiness in love is our attractions. I can’t promise, but I think that my next episode is going to be about being attracted to narcissists and how that happens, what we can do about it, and how that’s playing out in the world context right now and in our country. Getting back to this though, the ability to study, well, who are the kind of people that I tend to get attracted to? What kind of people turns me on the most? If I look at my patterns of relationships, what have been the negative patterns that I ended up discovering my partners had again and again? What are the key ones? What are the major ones so that I can know to look out for those? Another question is, what are the qualities that were wonderful qualities that I found in some of the people that I dated or had relationships with? How can I look really more clearly and strongly for those same qualities again, because our attractions are more than just attractions? They’re X-rays into the shape of our being. They’re X-rays into the state of our self-love and self-honoring. In my book, my courses, and all my work, this is one phase of the journey that we always focus on, which is doing a study of our attractions to find out what that teaches about the parts of ourselves we haven’t learned how to love yet because they’re directly linked.

Be Confident

This crazy focus on your attractiveness, I promise you that you can let go of a huge percentage of it because it’s not what’s going to help you find the kind of love that’s going to last. It’s the deeper skills of intimacy and dating that we teach here that really make all the difference in the world. That’s one, this tyrannical, obsessive, painful, self-defeating relentless focus on extreme attractiveness. Here’s another one. You need to be confident if you want to find love. I’m just going to speak about this one briefly, but there is a relentless fixation on confidence as well, on coolness and confidence. Now, natural confidence is a glorious thing. Just believing in ourselves and trusting ourselves, but in a way that has humility and flexibility, where we can acknowledge and admit the ways that we’re not perfect, but we’re somehow essentially confident in our goodness, our capacity, our decency. That’s just a glorious thing, unequivocally but the truth is that most of us spend some chunk of time not being confident. This belief that when we’re in that state, we can’t date. We can’t find love. We can’t build intimacy is hugely not true. There’s a set of skills of how to be with ourselves and be in the world when we’re feeling really shy when we’re feeling insecure when we’re feeling inadequate when we’re feeling uncertain. There’s a set of skills that we can learn where we can honor ourselves in the process and ask ourselves the huge question, “What do I need now?” What we might need might be to ask somebody for something. It might be to have time and space alone. It might be any one of a number of things. When we’re not feeling confident, when we’re in a zone where we’re not feeling together and integrated, and our question becomes, “How can I come off that way?” We create a kind of corrosion of our internal structure. There’s a feeling of rumbling that we fight against all the time or I’ve described it as kind of climbing a wobbly ladder. The wiser question to ask is, “What do I need right now?” Which is much more self-loving question.

Instrumentality and Expressiveness

Confidence is great, natural confidence, but we do not need to force a confidence. The deeper and wiser path of confidence is knowing how to care for ourselves when we’re not feeling so confident and in truth. That’s authentic confidence. Here’s another one we hear all the time and I’ve talked about this a bunch, and I’m going to keep talking about it because it just kills me. So many well-known and well-respected teachers teach this information. I think it’s damaging and I think it’s limiting. What it is, is women, you want to stay in your feminine energy and cultivate your feminine energy, the heterosexual women, if you want to find a masculine man. Men, you need to be an alpha male. You need to be in your masculinity if you’re going to wow the women, for heterosexual women. I think that some of this same kind of gender role situations apply in the LGBTQ community as well, although dramatically less, which is why John Gottman has said that the LGBTQ+ community is just decades ahead in terms of relationship healthiness in the way that they are not trapped by these electrocuted tripwires of gender taboo. People say things like, “Yes, we all have masculine and feminine qualities, but women, if you really want a masculine man, you really need to be in your femininity because if you’re not, you will somehow scare the masculine men away.” I don’t really understand this, but it’s what they say. Men, if you want to seduce women, you need to be in your alpha state. I will never forget this wonderful, lovely man in one of my workshops saying to me, “I know that as a non-alpha man, I will never be able to find the kind of woman that I really want. The kind of really amazing women, they only want alpha men and I’m not that. I’ve come to accept that.” I’ve seen so many men damaged by this kind of male seduction routine belief about being an alpha male, such damage. They’ve come to me in therapy as have so many women around the issue of this femininity piece and said, “I have to fix this.” I say to them, “You have been deeply misled because the minute you’re not you, the minute you think, ‘I have to tweak myself into a more feminine or masculine space,’ you are not being you. You are being artificial. You are setting up a seduction technique that is ultimately going to backfire on you because authenticity is what you need to be.” A woman might be having sex with a guy and I know I’m talking very only heterosexual here. I will open that field up, but a woman is having sex with a guy and she really wants to ride him on top. She wants to be on top, but she thinks, “No, that is not feminine energy so I can’t do that,” or she might want to be more dominant or more empowered or a man might want to touch on his more submissive parts. Each of these people thinks taboo, “I do this and I will look so deeply unattractive,” and not even just in sex, but in interactions. All of us are forcing this stuff. We’re holding our bellies in all the time to try to be this model of what we’re supposed to be. Researchers who have a deeper awareness of this, don’t use the word masculine or feminine. They use the word instrumentality and expressiveness instead of masculinity and femininity because those principles are not based on your physiological anatomy, and that’s so much wiser and so much more true. Now, we’re in a stuck point in a way because culture determines what’s attractive and as our culture shifts, God knows now women can be so much more empowered. Men can be so much more instrumental. Men can be so much more expressive than might’ve been allowed in the past because the culture is changing, but we’re in an in-between state. Those of us who are choosing to be pioneers in expressing all different parts of our gender identity spectrum, or instrumentality or expressiveness, we’re pioneers, but we are also needing to look for people who can match us in that and do that with us. For all the men who worry that they’re not masculine enough, I want to say, “I promise you that whatever gender identity or gender identities you’re interested in, I promise you that there are so many people who would find your degree of instrumentality and expressiveness the cat’s meow. I promise this is true.” Women, the same thing is true. Whatever your kind of places that you are in the spectrum of instrumentality or expressiveness or masculine and feminine as people often say, I promise you that there are people who will absolutely love that, need that, and want that. This is another truth that we’re not told that just feels like so much dating advice is crushing without even meaning to be. Here’s another one. We get told and we believe because it seems to make rational sense that the search for love is a numbers game, but I will prove to you that that is not true. Because the amount of matches that happen now and the amount of numbers of people that you can meet in online dating, if this numbers game thing was true, it would mean that more people are coupled and happily coupled, but the research shows that that is far from the truth. That number of matches does not directly correlate in any way, shape, or form to your success in finding love. In doing the research that I’ve done, and meeting people that I would have thought wouldn’t be able to find partners because of their state of poverty. The fact that maybe they just got diagnosed with a terminal illness and they had a very, very short amount of time left, or people with disabilities that are just, you know, extremely profound. I have seen, again and again, these people by doing the work of their own intimacy journey, find amazing, amazing, real, and lasting love. I’ve seen so many people without these challenges, not be able to find love. I’ve really come to believe that it is so much more about your interstate. Does it take bravery? Does it take getting out there? Yes, it does. It doesn’t just happen like a miracle. I mean, it can, but really, I believe we need bravery and we need to get out there. I do believe that the more we make this decision to be truly who we are, and the more we make the choice to only look for people with whom that self feels safe, honored, cherished and where it’s mutual. When we make those choices and combine bravery with that, our chance of finding love goes up amazingly. I know that so many older women feel like, “The numbers are against me. There are so few guys of my age who want to date somebody like me.” I know that the numbers really do reveal the truth of that, but what I also know is that the determining factor in my mind is so much less numbers and so much more who you are and how you let yourself be and your willingness to get out there being who you are. Here’s the last one that just kills me. How many times have you seen articles that say things like, “Have you noticed that some women just without even trying to attract these incredibly wonderfully desirable quality men or women or people? The people just kind of like are at their feet, loving them. What do they have that’s so special? Have you noticed that some guys can just really get any woman or any person that they want? Somehow, they’ve just got this thing. You can have it too and here’s how.” This, my friends, is the path to hell and I just cringe at this advice. As I’ve said so many times, you do not want to be someone who is “irresistible” to quality people. You want to be you and you want to find somebody who the real you is experienced as irresistible and wonderful and glorious. It’s an act of bravery and faith to not feel like you have to learn these skills and these qualities that are going to seduce people that are going to make you irresistible and say, instead, “I am going to cultivate the essence of who I am. I’m going to lead with the essence of who I am. I’m going to be brave in doing that and I’m going to look for people with whom my soul feels safe and with whom I feel inspired.” Is that a kind of lonely, scary path? A little bit. That’s why we need help and why we need support in this path of truth. I want to say that in some ways, this mirrors the path of intimacy and it mirrors the artist’s path as well. Because in an intimate relationship, any kind of relationship, we’re always going to have voices that tell us who we think we’re supposed to be. Those voices sometimes can be useful and help us as measuring sticks about good qualities, but often they guide us into thinking that we’re supposed to be someone different than we are and then we try to be that. Instead of the true path of intimacy, which is an artist’s path and a warrior’s path and a lover’s path and it’s the path of saying, “What am I really feeling? What am I really experiencing? Who am I really now? What are my needs? What are the needs of the person I’m with? What are the ripples of confusion, ambivalence, beauty, aching, and longing or uncertainty? What are those feelings that I’m feeling and staying with the truth of those?” That’s the artist’s path too because an artist needs to say, “What’s my real experience. What am I really seeing? What am I really feeling versus what society and culture tell us I should be seeing or feeling at this moment?” This is the warrior’s path and it’s the path of intimacy and thinking that you need to do all these things to become irresistible is just simply the path to hell and it’s a path that moves us away from liberation, self-love, and healing. I’m happy to have shared these thoughts about this kind of toxic and kind of almost violent dating advice that ultimately really hurts us, but compels us so deeply at the same time to want to follow it. I want to point out the hope embedded in the messages that we’re talking about here. You don’t always need to be confident. You need to be able to navigate the parts of you where you don’t feel confident and interact with the world from there. That’s a kind of greatness and intimacy. You don’t need to force yourself into roles of typical masculine or feminine behavior in order to attract people and not repel people. You do not want to be someone who is irresistible to quality people. You want to be you.CLICK TO TWEETIt is so much less a numbers game than we’ve been taught. You do not have to worry about becoming irresistible, and it’s less about the fixation on attractiveness and so much more about a deeper wiser understanding of your attractions and learning to work with them. That’s why this deeper path to love is so much of a richer and more healing path. Thank you all for reading. I encourage you, if you could, to go to DeeperDatingPodcast.com and join my mailing list. I look forward to seeing you in the next episode of the Deeper Dating Podcast.

Table of Contents

• Your Intimacy Shadow
• Your Core Gifts
• Your Life Genius

How To Discover Your Intimacy Shadow

How To Unshackle Your Potential For Authentic Love

Discovering and embracing your intimacy shadow is the key to unlocking your potential for authentic love. Stay tuned to this episode to learn more. — Hi, everybody. Welcome to the Deeper Dating Podcast. This is Ken with his croaky cold voice. I’m a psychotherapist and a coach and the author of the book Deeper Dating, the co-founder of the online meeting event DeeperDating.com, and the host of this show. Today in this podcast, I’m going to help you understand how you can discover and embrace what I call your intimacy shadow. This week and every week, I’m going to share with you the greatest tools that I know to help you find love, keep it flourishing, and heal your life in the process because the real skills of dating are just the skills of intimacy. If you want to learn more about this approach to finding and keeping love, just go to DeeperDatingPodcast.com. You can sign up for my mailing list, get free gifts, and get transcripts of every episode. If you like what you’re hearing here, it would be a fabulous thank you if you could leave a review on iTunes or elsewhere. The last thing I want to say is that everything I’m going to share in this podcast is educational in nature, it’s not medical or psychiatric advice. If you’re experiencing any serious psychological symptoms, please do seek professional help. Okay, let’s jump in. Thank you for bearing with my croaky voice. I’m excited about recording this podcast and I’m just going to go with it in my current croaky voice but hopefully, we’ll have my regular voice back really soon. Something I talk about a lot is that the parts of ourselves that we think we need to airbrush out in order to be attractive and to find love are actually, and this is just such a mystery, are the keys to finding love. They’re the keys in a few different ways. One way that these parts of ourselves that we feel timid about revealing are the key to finding love is because they are our genius. They are our deep sensitivity and passion. That’s why we’re so careful around them. That’s why we can be hurt so much there, but they are the land of our genius. They explain what hurts us. They explain what fills our hearts and they teach us who is right for us. Another reason though that they are so pivotal, so important, is because they are essential parts of our being. When we cut them out, when we airbrush them, when we deny their ferocity, their tenderness, their original truth, it’s like we are shutting our beings down. When we don’t honor those parts of ourselves and honoring doesn’t necessarily mean speaking because these parts of ourselves are not meant for all company. They’re deep, they’re tender, they’re powerful. We don’t just run through life expressing them everywhere. It’s a journey.

Your Intimacy Shadow

  It’s an entire life journey to learn to bear the tenderness and the ferocity of those parts of ourselves but always, always the place to start is with the naming them, the identifying them, and the developing a sense of their power and their beauty and their worth, no matter what we’ve been told or taught. When we don’t do that, there are repercussions. Some of the repercussions are that we choose people who do not know how to honor these parts of us. We get involved in a drama where we try to get them to love us for who we are even though it’s an essentially failed task because it’s based on our not being able to dignify those parts of ourselves. It’s being enacted with someone who also doesn’t know how to dignify those parts of ourselves. The beautiful thing, and I talk about this all the time, is that the more we name and treasure and honor those parts of ourselves, the more our attractions change. This is the single greatest piece of good news that I know for anybody seeking love. The more you name these parts of yourselves, we’re going to talk more about how to do that in this episode, the more you will find yourself attracted to and meeting people who know how to treasure these parts of you. It’s an amazing and essential truth but it’s not one we really get taught. Other kinds of repercussions are that when we bury these parts of ourselves, we often feel shame and we often feel anger. We might not let ourselves consciously feel that anger but it’s there, because who wants to be imprisoned? Who wants to be crushed? Our gifts certainly get pissed off if that happens to them. Who wants to be confined to a container that denies us freedom and self-honoring? There’s an anger that may be consciously felt or not. Also, what happens is when we can’t honor these parts of ourselves, which I call our intimacy shadow and I’ll tell how to know them in a few minutes. When we can’t, our ways of handling these parts of ourselves in the world will be essentially immature. They will be a child’s method of self-protection. They will include kind of acting out, suppressing, shame, and indirect expression of our frustration, and our pain, and not being in a place where we honor the very core of our being, which is constantly emanating expression, experience, and aliveness, and the desire for authentic connection with the world. When we shut that down, it creates a number of cycles of pain and then modern dating advice does not help us because it doesn’t tell us that this radical authenticity is the path to finding love. It tells us, no, we have to fix ourselves. We have to change ourselves. We have to flirt better. We have to become these people that will just make women fall to their knees or make men worship us at our feet like all of this crap that ultimately deeply, deeply takes us away from the serious, beautiful journey of finding love through authenticity. These essential parts of ourselves that we have learned to hide or suppress in order to protect ourselves are our shadow parts. When we claim them, we find our heart, we dramatically increase our capacity for love, and we find access to a tremendous sense of personal power and also creativity, sense of freedom, Eros, and just aliveness. This reflects the most profound and meaningful paradox that I have encountered in my three and a half decades of practice as a psychotherapist. It’s this, the parts of ourselves that we fear will scare love away are actually, in the end, the missing link to finding that love. At the end of the day, the parts of ourselves that we feel will scare love away can be the missing link to finding deeper love.CLICK TO TWEET

Your Core Gifts

I’m going to give you a question that’s going to help you find your own intimacy shadow. On the surface, it’s going to appear really innocuously simple but if you tackle it honestly and you could do this, just like with all the other podcasts, you can like do it as you walk, do it as you drive, do it as you’re just listening, do it right now. Just answer the questions right as you go along. When you do that, it will point you to potentially the most exhilarating challenge of your life. Here’s the question? What aspects of yourself are you the most uncomfortable, hesitant, or timid to reveal in your relationships? All of us have parts of ourselves where we feel things more deeply than other people. Life just affects us really more deeply around these attributes and I call these our core gifts, and they’re the heart and the soul of the path that I teach. In fact, I’m starting new sets of intensives now, and these are six months intensives, and we spend almost half of the intensive on the discovery and the naming of our core gifts. You can learn so much more about this from my book Deeper Dating, or my audio course as well, or any of my other courses. These core gifts are the rudder of our being. We feel joy and pain most intensely at these points and the intensity of our experience with the joy or the pain often makes us feel uncomfortable and also somehow different than the people around us. Let me give you some examples and see if any of these hit you or feel true to you. An unrelenting desire for connection, a passion that is so intense that it could feel aggressive, a generosity of spirit so powerful that it can hurt, a quietness or softness of nature that you might have deemed as weak. A passion for truth that has gotten you in trouble again and again and again, a sensitivity so strong that sometimes even seemingly tiny experiences knock you down at the knees, or just gusts of emotion so strong that they bewilder you or embarrass you. These are your core gift places. These are the language of yourself. These are the places that the world does not teach us how to embrace their wildness, their tenderness, their vastness, essentially. They are the key to deeper love including essential love of self, but often those parts of ourselves are taken advantage of, or abused, or neglected because they’re so unique. They’re so vulnerable and people milk those qualities sometimes in us, instead of honoring them like milking our generosity, our competency, our capacity. In addition, like all special gifts and talents, like all genius, these parts of ourselves demand inordinate amounts of fuel, maturity, and wisdom, and training, which most of us never receive. As a result, these parts of ourselves become repositories of our deepest insecurities but they also hold the key to understanding why love evades us and Jung explained this beautifully through his seminal concept of the shadow. According to Jung, the shadow is our disowned self. It’s the parts of ourselves that we think are unlovable, unworthy, too strange, unacceptable. They’re the parts of ourselves that really do spawn our deepest insecurities but they’re also the parts of ourselves that hold our greatest gifts. How amazing that we have been built this way, that the universe works this way, that this is kind of the deeper physics of finding and keeping love? How amazing that is that the last place we want to look is the first place we should be looking, which is in the magic that we’ve been hurt by inside us, so we’ve pushed aside. How powerful, what an amazing story that is. It’s kind of an epic journey and it is the epic journey of deeper love. Ultimately, when we suppress those parts of ourselves, it protects us from immediate pain, but it keeps deeper love forever at arm’s length and it leaves us with a sense of emptiness and insecurities that eat at us.

  To protect these parts of ourselves, we create immature defenses that are self-sabotaging, but they’re the best we could do that push away the very love we desire. Another thing that happens, and this is like, it’s an amazing corollary, the degree to which we push those parts down is the degree to which we’re going to be drawn to people who can’t love us for who we are or that we find that we meet people who can love us for who we are and we can’t sustain the dynamic joy of true intimacy in our love relationships. That’s because hiding these parts of ourselves is more than just avoidance. It is an act of quiet violence against our very nature and it creates a terrible vacuum where our authenticity is supposed to be. In the long run, that vacuum ends up being filled with relationships and situations that just diminish us. This is how Jung said it. He said, “That which we do not bring to consciousness appears in our life as fate,” or you might say those core gifts that we do not learn how to treasure appear in our lives as crappy romantic relationships, as painful romantic relationships.

Your Life Genius

In my work as a psychotherapist and a teacher, my most essential task is to help my clients discover that those very parts of themselves they feel most hesitant to reveal, reflect their life genius. A genius that the world probably never taught them to cultivate channel and express in positive ways. The act of discovering the tremendous worth of these orphaned parts of ourselves creates an absolute sea change in our lives. This is something that I have the privilege of seeing happen again and again, and has happened in my own life and continues to happen because God knows it’s not like I have done it. It is a constant ongoing process and that’s why I believe in practices like my exercise, my favorite exercise, which I teach in episode three, which is The Inner Mentor™ Processes. It’s one of my most powerful ways to help me kind of continue to deconstruct the shame and grow wisdom and capacity, in embracing and expressing my core gifts. As we learn, as you learn, as I learn to perceive these parts of ourselves that are our shadow parts as gifts and not as liabilities, life starts to really make more sense. It’s like the underlying story of our life begins to come clear. These things are really true. I’ve seen this again and again. We start to lose our taste for people who chip away at our self-esteem. We choose relationships differently and single people really do start to find themselves meeting and being attracted to people who accept them for who they are. People in couples begin to risk revealing feelings of deeper passion, or intensity, or vulnerability, or need, and relationships that have been stagnant begin to come alive as authenticity, which is the key to true intimacy, starts to reemerge. People develop a sense of inner dignity that comes naturally. It’s this experience that I describe as kind of being lit from within and a sense of self-worth comes with this as well as finding our tribe which is the people with whom these parts of ourselves are essentially deeply, automatically appreciated, and respected. This journey of learning to honor, and dignify, and cultivate a wiser discipline around your core gifts, around your shadow self is not for the faint of heart, but it is, I believe without a doubt, the true adventure of deeper love. Thank you for listening, including to my raspy voice this week. I look forward to seeing you on the next episode of the Deeper Dating Podcast. Again, you can go to DeeperDatingPodcast.com to sign up for my mailing list. Thank you all.

Table of Contents

• A Few Caveats
• When Love Goes Subterranean
• The Love Within You

Watch the episode here:

How We Can Invite Love Back

Why Love Can Feel Like It’s Gone Away

Why do feelings of love sometimes feel like they’ve just waned or gone away? What can we do to invite them back? Stay tuned to this episode of the Deeper Dating Podcast to learn more. — Hi, everybody and welcome to the Deeper Dating Podcast. I’m Ken Page, a psychotherapist, the author of the book Deeper Dating, the Cofounder of DeeperDating.com, a new way for single people to meet, and the host of this podcast. Today, I’m going to talk about how love can come back. Every week, I’m going to share with you the greatest tools that I know to help you find love, keep it flourishing, and heal your life in the process. Because the skills of dating really just the skills of love and the skills of love are the greatest and most important skills of all so that we can have the lives we want. If you want to learn more about the deeper dating path to real intimacy, go to DeeperDatingPodcast.com. You can sign up for my mailing list, get free gifts, and learn about how to use these ideas to transform your own intimacy journey, as well as finding transcripts of every episode. I also want to say that everything I share in this podcast is educational in nature. It is not medical or psychiatric advice. If you feel you’re experiencing some serious psychological or psychiatric conditions, please seek professional help. If you like what you’re learning here, it would be wonderful if you could leave me a review on iTunes or elsewhere. Thank you so much for that. I’m going to dive right in. I think one of the many painful and harmful myths that we are taught about love is that if there’s a steady, solid love, we are supposed to experience that love steadily. To me, that is just not how love works. Love goes subterranean. Sometimes we don’t even notice it when we love someone really deeply. We don’t feel it when we’re annoyed at them. We don’t feel it when we’re in the middle of mundane tasks, but in then certain situations, our heart swells with a feeling of love for that person, even though at other times, we don’t think of that person or we’re with them and we feel almost nothing. We might wonder, “Do I not love deeply enough?” or we’re with the other person and they seem to be in a kind of mundane place and we’re feeling filled with love?

A Few Caveats

We wonder, “Do they love me enough?” The truth is that love is so deep and so profound that it can’t be held in the hands of our cognition. It’s too vast and too profound for that and its language is one that we spend our whole lives learning and it bewilders us. It tricks us, it plays hide and seek with us and on some level, we just need to kind of make peace with that reality. Today, I’m going to talk about the ways that we can experience love coming back – because love can surprise us in the ways that it comes back, can, and does. I also just want to say that some of you might be thinking now, “Oh, boy. I don’t want to hear about how love comes back. I tried so hard to end an unhealthy relationship with a narcissist.” It was brutal. I don’t want to think about love coming back. I just want to say that I truly understand that and, in many cases, it’s best for love not to come back. It’s best not to do all the work that it takes to make that love come back. It’s best to stay away. I just want to give some examples of those kinds of situations because maybe your heart is aching to have love come back, but you know it’s not good for you. I don’t want to step on that. I want to honor that. I know that that’s one of the hardest things of all. If there is any kind of serious addiction, you’re at risk in the relationship. If there’s a serious addiction and the person doesn’t want to change or get better, that risk is more profound. Love is so deep and so profound that it can't be held in the hands of our cognition.CLICK TO TWEETWe all need to make personal choices about what we’re going to do in that case of being in a relationship with someone who is actively addicted to something and that’s a very personal choice. In the case of addiction, many of the things that I say about love coming back just won’t be true or won’t be able to stick. Those are just not safe situations. If there’s serious psychiatric conditions or mental illness that are not risks, that are not stabilized,that includes major depression, really serious depression, where they’re not stabilized and the person is not getting help or not getting enough help. Those are problem situations too. Again, it’s an existential and personal choice who we’re going to stay with and who we’re not but I’m just saying that these are situations where if your gut tells you to leave, if you have to work to not keep trying to make love come back, I want to honor that. A person who is not willing to do the work in a relationship – that’s another area where there’s going to be real problems. Even if the feeling of love comes back briefly if both of you are not willing to do the hard work, it really may not be worth it if the other person is a serious narcissist. My friend Hara Marano, who is the Advice Columnist for Psychology Today says, and I repeat this all the time, “There are three C’s in making a choice about who we want to be with and those are character, character, and character.” If you’re with someone who doesn’t have deep and essential integrity, who’s not willing to do the work, who lies to you, who is abusive to you, who cheats on you, these are situations where you really may want to get out.

When Love Goes Subterranean

In any situation where you or your children or loved ones are in any serious danger, those are situations where you need to get out but don’t do it in a way that is rash. Do it with the help of a professional expert, because those can be really risky situations. Those were kind of like caveats that I needed to say. Now I want to talk about love coming back in situations where that’s a really good thing. A magical thing about love and it doesn’t feel so magical often is that it can go subterranean. It can feel like it’s disappeared and a kind of adult understanding of love lets us know that it may feel like it’s disappeared, but it probably hasn’t disappeared. This is a story I often tell about an ex of mine who was a very wise person. I looked at him during a really difficult time and I asked him, “Do you still love me?” He said, “Of course, I do.” He said, “It’s like the moon or the sun in an eclipse. I don’t see it now. I don’t feel it now, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not there.” This was so wise and so beautiful and something I really held onto. Maybe we feel our love diminishing. Maybe we feel our partner’s love diminishing and then all of a sudden, you go on vacation or your partner does something really brave or really wonderful or really kind and you see the beautiful parts of them where that happens for them toward you and then the feelings kind of come pouring back. These in and out experiences with love are supposed to happen but our job is to live and relate in such a way that we do the continuous work of rediscovering love, and it is work. It’s almost like, if you ever dug a hole at the beach when the waves were coming, you had to dig fast enough that the hole wouldn’t keep being completely covered up. You had to dig faster than the wave. In day-to-day life and in day-to-day difficulties, there is a trend toward numbness, a trend toward rushing, a trend toward insensitivity, a trend toward getting too accustomed to each other, a kind of familiarity that’s not a loving one. All those trends exist and we have to do ongoing tasks of digging in the sand so that we keep uncovering the love that can go subterranean. We do that at a pace that’s faster than the numbing pace of life that moves us away from these deeper experiences of love.

  John Gottman talks about the concept of bids which is a fabulous intimacy concept. A really important one. In a couple, in a relationship, in a friendship, we each put out bids and those bids are bids to be seen and noticed and recognized so that I might say to someone I love, “Look at that boat with that incredible blue color.” I say this because it’s really beautiful looking to me, and the person I’m with just says, “Oh yeah, blue. I got the greatest blue outfit yesterday.” I am going to feel not seen. The bid that I made for connection for being seen was dropped and the quality of a relationship can be determined by the number of bids that are beautifully picked up and responded to, and the ones that are dropped and ignored. We need, especially in long-term relationships or with old friends, to notice the way that we drop bids and change that. When we do, we resuscitate the visceral experience of intimacy, treasuring, and care. It’s like love gets refound or rediscovered or relearned. That is a beautiful, beautiful, surprising, and wonderful process and in long-term relationships, it takes work, it takes ongoing work, but we must do that work because that’s the work of love. I want to give a story of how this takes place in dating, and a story of how this takes place in an ongoing relationship. These are two stories of people that I know and they’re amazing stories. This is the story of Mark and Sarah. Mark and Sarah met, they dated, they had a really deep bond, but Mark felt like Sarah wasn’t really exactly his type. He loved her, he adored her, he was attracted to her, but he was looking for a different type. They dated, they had a passionate, deep, wonderful connection but he never was sure for him. Love had never fully arrived or he might’ve said it did arrive maybe, but it wasn’t enough to make him want to love. This is quite an amazing story. At a certain point, Sarah just couldn’t do it anymore. She said, “We’re stopping. This is too painful. I can’t do it.” Mark and Sarah both agreed in very adult ways that this was the right thing to do. Mark was dating all these different women and really having a ball and not missing Sarah. He literally did not miss her. This is very intense but I know Mark. I know this story. He told me this story. One night, he did not know this, but Sarah had met a guy that she really liked and they were moving toward potentially getting married and this guy was going to pop the question. The night before that was going to happen, Mark was brusquely awakened out of the middle of sleep. It was like somebody was shaking him and he had no idea what this was. It was a terrifying experience for him because there was nobody in the room, but he felt that, he sat bolt upright. It felt like a presence of his mother who had passed away when he was much younger, which was incredibly painful to him, the loss of his mom, but he felt her presence and he felt like she was shaking him and saying, “What are you doing? You’re going to lose her.” Anyway, love came back. This is a remarkable story but it’s a story that captures something really beautiful. The next morning, he woke up, called his best friend. They bought a ring and he went and he proposed to Sarah. Many years later, they are so deeply happily married with kids and a beautiful life together. Isn’t that amazing that he didn’t even remember that he loved her or that he missed her or needed her until that moment that somehow he encountered a level of being where he felt his love, which thank God, he did? This is an amazing story about dating and it relates in so many different ways, but this is why I deeply encouraged people to slow down in their dating life and have moments where you see the person. Moments where you feel the person, moments where you’re sober and you do things together that are beautiful or inspiring. You have rich conversations because without that, you’ll forget the sense of caring. It’s an amazing mystery how we can do this, but we do it all the time. We do it with our kids, we do it with our spouses, we do it with our parents, and we do it with our pets because the act of loving is more of an action. Love can sometimes be like the sun in an eclipse. You might not see it now, but that doesn’t mean it’s not there.CLICK TO TWEETIt’s an action of digging to those deeper spaces as opposed to having it just be there and if it’s not just there, that means the love isn’t deep enough. I want to tell you another story. This is another very moving story. I’m allowed to tell this story even though these were clients that I worked with because they gave me complete permission, but I’m still not going to use their names, or details, because this is an even broader platform than I usually share these stories in. Somebody came to see me who had been in a relationship with his partner for over twenty years. He came to see me because he didn’t feel like he was being authentic. He felt like he wasn’t in love with his partner anymore. The love was not there. He liked him, but the love wasn’t there. I’m going to do my very best not to cry during this story because it’s an intense one. He came to see me about this and he decided that his goal was to end the relationship, which of course I respected. We discussed it this way and that way in all different ways because I really believe both feet in before you decide to go both feet out. He really felt like he was doing both feet in and he knew he was ready for both feet out. He could not do it. Finally, he wrote a letter to his partner and he told his partner, “I care about you deeply. I will always be your friend, but I’m not in love and I haven’t been in love in years. I feel this is the right thing to do.” This was devastating to his partner, but his partner handled it very graciously, very beautifully, and with a lot of dignity, although it was immensely hard. His partner was much older than him and was profoundly ill at that point. He had an oxygen tank and had to breathe that way. My client did this. They both knew that it was going to be over. My client was preparing for it to be over but somehow, after he said, “This is over, I don’t love you,” love came back, unless and until he had the freedom to be able to say no. This was just him, God knows it’s not true for everybody, but for him until he had the freedom to do that terrifying no, there wasn’t room for love to be felt. It was time for him to tell his partner that he decided, and realized, and had the revelation that he actually really loved him and that love had gone hidden for so many years as they had inured themselves into a daily romance, free relationship. He was going to say to his partner, “I love you.” Those were words that he had not spoken in decades. That was the plan, he was going to do that. He went to do that and he couldn’t do it. He came back, “Ken, I didn’t do it.” He came back again, “Ken, I didn’t do it.” He came back again, “Ken, I can’t do it. Will you help me?” This is something that I rarely do but because his partner couldn’t come to me in my office because of his oxygen, I went to their house. I went to their apartment and my client had written a very beautiful letter and he was going to read it when we were together. I went over there and I was with the two of them, these two very lovely men. I said, “This is to help my client be able to say something he wants to say.” My client read this very beautiful letter saying that he loved him and did want to be together. The joy that was in his partner’s face hearing that news was so moving. It was so beautiful. It was very sweet, very emotional, and very amazing. He had to go through that whole thing of no, he had to go through that whole thing of being someone who was not trapped in a relationship for love to come back.

  The story continues because they did this and they acknowledged their bonds of love. A few days later, my client went to work and came back and his partner was lying on the floor dying. My client took him in his arms and held him, then brought him to the hospital and his partner passed away, but his partner passed away knowing how much they both loved each other. This is a precious and amazing story that I wanted to share with you but I can’t tell you how many stories I have seen and how this has been true in my own relationship in my own life. The experience of love coming back because you don’t stop trying. Love coming back because you speak truth. Love coming back because you make room for your freedom and the other person makes space for that.

The Love Within You

I wanted to share these rich and beautiful stories but now I want to say something else too because I think that a question is, and this is a rich, rich question for all of us, “what shuts us down so we don’t feel those deeper streams of love?” What makes us numb to love? When do we get numb to love? How do we behave when we’re numb to love? These are such rich questions and then here’s another really rich question. What do you do that puts you into a zone where you can feel the ripples and the eddies and the pulls and the movements of love deep within you? What are those things that you do because those things are gold and I believe they’re not optional because our hearts harden with, most of our hearts, harden without help? These skills, the skills that I try to teach in this podcast, the things that you know of that help you soften your heart, these are gold and these are the path that we need to keep doing and keep staying in so that love can surprise us. Grant Shepherd, is someone who ia decades-long meditator and a teacher of Tantra, taught me and my husband the most beautiful practice, that’s a practice that helps us do this and I want to share it with you and you can find out more about Grant by going to ConsciousPathways.net. It’s just what he calls a Tantric Hug, which is at any time of the day, we put our feet super close together, we hug each other, but it’s not like a one-second hug or a peck. It’s like a holding so that as much of our bodies as possible touch. We hold each other like that and sink into the love. We put our foreheads together and just hold our foreheads together and then end with hugging again. We do this all the time because it brings us to magic land. A magic land that a moment before we might not have felt or recognized or known was even there or so close to the surface. There’s such richness here. There’s such hope here, and there’s such mystery in how feelings of love play hide and seek, and how steady love is never experienced in some ways as truly steady. Thank you for listening to this episode and I look forward to seeing you on the next episode of the Deeper Dating Podcast.

Table of Contents

• The Wave
• Dating In The Time Of COVID
• Moving Slowly
• The Real Deal
• Attraction Of Deprivation Into Attraction Of Inspiration

Deeper Dating Q&A: Expert Advice For All Your Questions About Love, Dating And Sex

How Do I Date During COVID Times? Can An Unhealthy Relationship Ever Really Become A Healthy One? And More!

Welcome to the Deeper Dating Q&A, where I answer your most pressing questions about love, sex and intimacy. I do it in such a way that you can apply these insights to the particulars of your own love life and your own dating life. You’re going to leave this episode with a sense of new possibilities and hopefully some revelations about your own intimacy journey. — Hello, everybody and welcome to the Deeper Dating Podcast. I’m Ken Page and I’m a psychotherapist, author of the book, Deeper Dating, host of this show and the Cofounder of DeeperDating.com, a new way for single people to meet in an environment that is respectful, kind and inspiring. Today, I’m going to be answering some of your questions about dating love and relationships. Every week, I’m going to be sharing with you the greatest tools that I know to help you find love and keep it flourishing and heal your life in the process. The skills of dating are nothing more than the skills of love. Those are the greatest skills of all for us to have happy lives. If you want to learn more about this approach, go to DeeperDatingPodcast.com. You can sign up for my mailing list, get free gifts, and learn more about the work that I’m doing, and other people, who I respect, are doing as well. You’ll also find complete transcripts of every episode. I also want to say that every piece of advice or insight that I share in this show is educational in nature. It’s not medical or psychiatric advice or treatment. If you feel like you need help around some serious issues, please do yourself the favor of getting that help. If you like what you’re learning here, it would be fabulous if you could subscribe and leave me a review. I so appreciate the reviews that I’ve been getting. Now, we’re going to jump into the first question.

The Wave

Someone asked me to speak about the wave. She talked about somebody that she’s known over six years. They work together and they’ve always been comfortable together. She used to find him very attractive at the time that he was married – such similarities and connections. When he was going through a divorce, she wondered if there could be more between the two of them. She’s continually dated emotionally unavailable people, and she wants something different and he is interested in her. The question that this person has is that she feels repulsed at the idea of being physical with him. She’s wondering, “why is this?” Is this what I call the wave? That she guesses that if he was more unavailable or less responsive, she would find him hot. The question is, “Is this the wave and how do I navigate it?” Here are some thoughts that I want to share about this. My guess is that at least a significant part of what’s going on with this for you is the wave. Why? A few different reasons. One, you’ve been attracted to this guy before when he was not available. Two, you have a history of being attracted to unavailable men. Whenever we have a history of being attracted to unavailable or not very kind, decent, or responsive people, when we meet someone who is all those things, the chances are huge that we’re going to experience the wave, the wave of distancing. Which means you start feeling repulsed, you lose interest, you feel suffocated, you ache for freedom again, to go back to the hunt. Maybe certain things about the person start irritating you badly that didn’t irritate you before. These are all the different kinds of things that can happen when we encounter the wave. Online dating is built to be like a bag of chips. You keep going for the next one and the next.CLICK TO TWEETI talk about this a lot. When we hit the wave, it’s a place to celebrate because it means we’ve probably found someone available and decent, and we are scared because this could be real or we could get engulfed or all of the different fears that come up for us. I am someone who was single for decades and decades because of the wave. The wave destroyed my romantic life and my possibilities for finding love for so much time. I find it amazing that this incredibly powerful dynamic that stops many of us from healthy love doesn’t get talked about, and we don’t get taught how to deal with it, which is something that I love to do because I’ve been through it so many times myself. I know that many other people have been through it as well. I also want to say that I speak about this in some more detail in episode 39, and certainly in my book and my audio course as well. The first and most important thing is to understand that, as strange as it seems, it most likely does not mean that your attraction for this person has gone away. What it means is that your psyche is registering the fact that this person could maybe not go away and that’s scary in its own. There’s such a beautiful freedom to somebody who’s sexy and unavailable, and you can’t fully get them to commit. You can’t feel it, but there’s such a freedom with that because they’re not in your face. They’re not remaining present. You don’t have to feel the fears that come about being trapped in a relationship. Those of us who have been repetitively attracted to people who aren’t good for us or aren’t available will go through the wave almost definitely. It comes and goes and comes back and disappears. I call it a wave because it is a wave. A wave hits you, it slams into you, and then it passes. Now, this wave will not pass if you force yourself to do things you’re not ready to do. If you force yourself to be more sexual than you’re ready to be. For example, with this person, you might ask yourself, “Do I feel repulsed physically? Is this something I would want to do with him? Maybe I would hold his hands. Maybe I would put my hand on his legs. I like his legs. That would feel good. That would feel nice.” “Maybe I’d like his arm around me. He put his arm around me at one point and that felt nice, but that’s all that I want to do.” You respect that and you honor it and you make space for it because this is only a wave and you don’t push yourself to do stuff you don’t want to do. That’s the first part. The second thing you do is not flee. not tell yourself, “I guess I’m too immature for healthy love,” not tell yourself, “That’s it. If I don’t feel anything now, the attraction wasn’t there, to begin with.” No, you know that it’s a strange, strange defense that your psyche is creating to protect you because it feels in danger of real intimacy. If when the wave hits, like for example, with this guy, you let yourself enjoy him, do the stuff you want to do with him. Take deep pleasure in all the connection you have with him. When you have little fantasies of wanting to touch him or be next to him or rub up against him or anything like that, you allow those fantasies. If you don’t have those fantasies, that’s fine too. You enjoy him and let the feelings grow. The chances are huge that the desire will come back. I know for me, with my husband, the wave hit and left and hit. I felt like a crazy person. Sometimes I felt like, “I am so in love.” Other times I would feel nothing. “What the hell have I gotten us into? I’m screwed and he’s screwed because I don’t feel anything,” but I knew what to do with the wave. This thing that had plagued me for so long, I gave it space.

I didn’t take it as seriously. I enjoyed Greg and I allowed the little bubbles of interest and connection and sexuality and Eros, all those things to bubble up when they bubbled up and give it space. Sure enough, it was that the feelings had gone subterranean for a while. That’s what I deeply suggest for you. Don’t flee. Don’t make assumptions. Understand this strange phenomenon in dating that we don’t get taught about, which is the wave, and try this technique. My guess is strong that the feelings will begin to come back if you give yourself a break and enjoy him.

Dating In The Time Of COVID

Someone else said, “With COVID, it’s not safe to start dating. How do you connect in a meaningful way if you can’t spend time with somebody? Those of us who were single and didn’t think ahead to get pandemic boyfriends and girlfriends need help not to be so lonely.” Here’s what I have to say to that. This is something very close to my heart. I’ve spent years working on a way for people to intimately meet online, which is DeeperDating.com, which is just being launched in a way that’s inspiring and warm and connected. The first thing that I would say, use the technologies, use the websites, use the apps that feel most suited to you, and filter for qualities that matter most to you wherever you can. Filter for interests and passions that matter most to you. Understand that there’s a lot of lying and a lot of bad behavior. It is the Wild West out there with online dating. There’s so much disrespect. That is how it is in most dating venues. Know that that’s true. On top of the fact that most of the people you meet won’t be right for you, which is that’s the land of dating, but use those venues anyway to the degree that you can. I talk about this a lot in my different podcast episodes. Honor the connections that you make because, in this land of plenty matches and little intimacy, we tend to swipe or move through people quickly. Take the time to look for real qualities of inspiration and go a little bit slower. Don’t do swipe circuitry. Do slow circuitry in your dating life and get to know the people you meet through this amazing resource of online dating, where you get to meet so many different people. Take the time to look for inspiration, which is the key in all forms of data. Don’t put up a wall to Eros and don’t put up a wall to intimacy when you’re doing online dating. There’s the tendency to think, “This is online dating. We can’t even meet anyway.” First, interacting through messaging, then actually hearing their voice, talking to them on video, these things can be very sexy, very Eros-filled. If we tell ourselves, “No, I cannot let that Eros come out. I can’t let myself feel those kinds of tendrils of desire hearing this person’s voice. I can’t let myself be too vulnerable, too intimate until I meet the person.” I encourage you not to think that because this is what we got now, folks. We need to start out with a deeper, richer authenticity, and allow Eros to form, allow interest, intimacy, and vulnerability to form even before you meet. Of course, we all need to be very honoring of people’s feelings about what feels safe and what doesn’t feel safe because we’re all in deep flux about that, depending on so many different issues that we’re facing. Make room for the person who needs the most safety in terms of distance and masks. Let that person be the decider, because safety is everything. Of course, you can encourage the person. There’s no reason not to get together six feet apart. If sexual desire and frustration happen, frustration is never fun, but that builds Eros as well. That longing builds Eros. We need to work with what we’ve got and that’s what I would say there. The thing about online dating is it’s flat. There’s like an agnostic quality to it. Take the time to look for inspiration, which is the key to all forms of dating.CLICK TO TWEETIt’s not values-based except the value of wanting to meet people. Look for sites, look for organizations, look for activities that are about people’s passions, where you can follow your own passions at the same time as you’re dating. Look for the events, look for the things that are the most values-driven, the most passion-driven, and do those things. Those are also wonderful ways that you can meet people. We need to let our Eros, our sexuality, our romance develop these days in virtual ways and distanced ways. We can honor that. We can honor the sexiness in that, the frustration in that, and we need to honor those things because it’s a different world. What I would say is don’t feel like you need to put any lid on your vulnerability, on your outreach, on your erotic self just because you can’t get close yet. Cultivate those things in a virtual environment and move as quickly as you can from messaging to phone. Move as quickly as you can from phone to video. Move as quickly as you can from video to meeting in person with whatever social distancing you want. Even in this world, romance can continue and continue in different ways.

Moving Slowly

Next, someone brings up a pretty amazing point. She says that she had listened to the episode on online dating hacks that I did. She said the thing that resonated with her was the concept of moving slowly. This is what she said, which I think is so fabulous because it’s so true for so many people. She said, “I get excited about someone and if they don’t respond, I get over-enthusiastic. I might reach out to them three different times because I’m nervous that they’re not interested enough or that some nice person who responds to me. I take days to respond to them if I respond to them at all.” I love this because this so captures how we flee love at the same time that we seek it. That’s a very human trait. These tendencies are cultivated by the abundance and the distance that exists in typical online dating. What I want to say is these are two areas for you to train yourself. I think it’s glorious when we can say, “I see I’m doing a behavior that I can’t stop, but I know it’s not good for me. I know it’s pulling me away from intimacy.” That to me is someone on their intimacy journey that they can say that. What do you do? Here’s what the research shows you do. You don’t try to change it on your own because it probably won’t work. You get help and you get support and you, what they call bookend it with somebody, you say, “This is what I’m working on.” Hopefully, this is a learning partner who’s also trying to grow in these ways. In my book and my courses, always, I link people with learning partners so that the learning can come together. All of you, if you know somebody, who’s interested in the deeper work of the intimacy journey, work with them to support each other. I promise you it’ll change your world when you do that. It will move you to love closer than doing and quicker than doing it alone. Back to these behaviors. With that, you have articulated two behaviors that don’t help. The first behavior is constantly reaching out to someone who’s not available. The quality to cultivate there would be eyes open. You reach out, maybe once more, you give it space. You notice if they don’t respond and you watch because you are learning things about who they are and you call your friends to cool down your jets when you want to reach out to this person again and again, and you don’t. You might want to give them another try. You might want to give them another two tries, but you don’t react based on that urgent feeling of, “I want to get them to see me.” That is hard as hell to do. That’s why we need the support of friends. That’s why we need to make this a conscious journey of growth. Next, the other one is huge. This is gold. There’s an ancient Hindu saying that says, “Sometimes poison tastes like honey and honey feels like it must be poison.” These people who are nice guys, who you’re finding that reach out to you, they are honey, but they feel like poison, in this case, would be boring. It is more boring to have to do the work. You do have to slog through a bit of boredom here. You do. It’s only a short slog because if the person is lovely, then you get inspired. It’s a little mini desert you have to cross off this stranger you don’t know and having to do the work and know that maybe they’re going to be boring. Maybe they’re not going to be nice. Maybe it’s going to be a waste of time. You’re not too excited, but you slog across that mini desert until you connect with the person and you show your heart, you show who you are, and you show your soul and you watch who they are.

  Sometimes it gets very exciting and it’s wonderful. These guys are your gold, the guys who boringly respond to you, and then you don’t answer because it’s more exciting to see the next person and the next person and online dating is built to be like a bag of chips. You keep going for the next and the next. It is built to sculpt that behavior in us. I think I’ve mentioned this before. Tinder gets 18,500 swipes per second every day or something like that. It’s addictive. It’s like gaming. It’s compulsive. The act of valuing the people we meet who don’t wildly thrill us, but seemed like they could be the land of potential, we need to honor those and move ahead with those. We need to get friends to support us and help us in doing that. The other piece is that often if we’re used to the spiciness of unavailable, cocky, arrogant people, kindness and decency and availability seem boring. That’s another mini desert we need to cross because, with the right person, those things are not boring. They’re gorgeous. We can cultivate a sense and a taste for that. Those are two behaviors that you can actually work on. My encouragement is to work on them with friends.

The Real Deal

Next fabulous question, someone asks, “Do I be authentic and tell the person that I’ve started dating? I’m looking for marriage. I’m looking for the real deal here. Does that scare people off? By not doing it and not stating my truth, am I actually encouraging game playing? Might I scare somebody off when I do this? When should I do it?” These are all fabulous questions. What I would say to this listener is three cheers for you because the most important thing is you are claiming the validity of what you want and wanting a committed relationship, and marriage is gorgeous. That is a gorgeous, wonderful thing that is meant to be honored. What I would say is you could say that pretty early on that you’re looking for a real relationship. It doesn’t have to mean that you’re looking for that with this person because you don’t know this person yet, but you could say that those are the longer-range goals. You might not want to do that right away. You want to give it time. I think it’s a good thing to give it a little bit of time to see who the other person is, but I completely agree. Don’t play games about what you want. I’ve told this story in another episode, but I know someone who read the book, The Rules, and she followed all of these rules about what a woman is supposed to do. God forbid, the woman says, “I want to get married and have kids.” The Rules, she felt, helped her in some ways about not pursuing unavailable people, but she met this guy and she liked him. They were in a group hike together. They sat down on a rock and they were eating lunch together. She’s scared, but she said, “I got to tell you this. I want you to know that I am looking for marriage and kids.” She was so scared because it went again against all of her training about what she was supposed to do. He looked at her and he said, “Where do I sign?” They’re still together to this day. It was so brave of her to do that. He was the guy who wanted to get married and have kids. I say three cheers for you. Thank you also for your words of appreciation about the podcast.

Attraction Of Deprivation Into Attraction Of Inspiration

The last question that I’m going to speak to is from someone who wrote something also sweet, saying that not everybody can afford therapy and that this is an opportunity to learn some of those lessons and that she’s very appreciative. Thank you so much for saying that. The question was, “Can a relationship that has been an attraction of deprivation turn into an attraction of inspiration?” The answer is absolutely yes if both partners are willing to do the work because that’s the big question. Now, if there is an addiction, until the person’s sober, it’s probably not ever going to be able to be an attraction of inspiration. Where they’re serious, unstabilized psychiatric disorders, the same thing is true. The person needs to have those stabilized. If the person is not willing to do the work of their own personal growth, facing their stuff, dealing with the real challenges of intimacy, it’s also not going to change. If those are not the case and the person is willing to do the work and you both are willing to listen to each other and learn from each other, then absolutely yes. The attraction of deprivation can become an attraction of inspiration, but you do need to watch, is this person going to remain unavailable or are they going to let themselves be available? Even though people put the words on it and make some effort, if they’re not willing to be available, you will know that over a period of time. I want to say that everyone to some degree is an attraction of inspiration and an attraction of deprivation and the brilliant theorist Harville Hendrix says that in any relationship, we reach a point where the thing that we most need from our partner becomes the thing that they’re least able to give us. That’s how intimacy works. All of that is true too, but there does need to be a deep availability, a basic availability, a willingness to do the work and kindness and goodness, and a basic sense of character. With those things there, I’d say it’s worth a try. Marianne Williamson has a great quote. She says, “Both feet in until both feet out.” Give it your all and try. If you feel at a certain point, it can’t work, then give it your all and leave in the best way you can. There is a chance that as you grow, the other person can and will grow too if they’re willing to. Thank you all for listening to this episode. Keep your questions coming. I adore them. Go to DeeperDatingPodcast.com and click on Ask Ken and leave your questions there. Have a wonderful week. I’ll see you in the next episode.

Table of Contents

• What Interactions From Your Relationship Inspire You And Hurt You The Most?
• Your Unique Genius, Your Truest Self
• What Is In You That Inspires Others?

Watch the episode here:

 

The Two Questions You Need To Ask About Your Relationship

Because We Get Hurt Precisely In The Places We Care The Most

What are two of the most powerful questions you can ask to heal and strengthen any relationship? Stay tuned to the Deeper Dating Podcast to find out. — Hi, everybody and welcome to the Deeper Dating Podcast. I’m Ken Page and I’m a psychotherapist, author of the book, Deeper Dating and the host of this show. Today, we’re going to talk about the two questions that you need to ask yourself about any important relationship that you have. This week and every week, I’m going to share with you the greatest tools that I know to help you find love and keep it flourishing and heal your life in the process because all the skills of dating are just the skills of intimacy. Those are the most precious skills of all for a happy and rich life. I also want to say that you can get the transcript of this episode by going to DeeperDatingPodcast.com. You can hear all my other episodes there. You can sign up for my mailing list and get free gifts there as well. I also want to say that I, and my husband, have created an online dating event based on all the values that I teach that we’re so excited about. You can go to DeeperDating.com to learn more about that and hear about events that will be hopefully in your neck of the woods as well. I also want to say that everything I talk about in this episode is going to be educational in nature. It’s not medical or psychiatric advice. If you’re experiencing any serious psychological or psychiatric conditions, please do seek professional help. Finally, I would so appreciate it if you could subscribe and leave me a review. I’m going to jump in now. Today, I’m going to teach you an exercise that can bring compassion and deep insight to any of your most important relationships, – romantic, friendship, family, and also point you toward greater closeness, healing and joy with your loved one. This exercise is going to ask you to reflect on two of the absolutely most important questions that can lead us to a richer and more conscious life. The questions are completely obvious, but our ability to discount and dishonor our responses to those questions is nothing short of breathtaking. You’ll see what I mean. We get hurt and inspired the most in the places we care about the most.CLICK TO TWEET

What Interactions From Your Relationship Inspire You And Hurt You The Most?

What I’d like you to start by doing, as we’ve done in so many of our other episodes, just do this while you’re listening. You can be running, you could be walking, you could be driving. You don’t need to write anything down, you could just answer these questions out loud as you go. It will enrich you and open your eyes to deeply important intimacy themes in your life, and point you toward your direction of deeper intimacy growth, which all of us want. Start by choosing a relationship you want to focus on. It could be someone you’re dating, someone you’re in a relationship with, a family member, a friend. You can do thisese tons of times. Choose whoever comes up for you first now. Question number one, what interactions in this relationship inspire you the most, touch your heart, make you feel safe, make you feel challenged, make you feel honored, make you feel like you belong, any of those kinds of questions. I’d like you to pause the recording if you like and just list them. Just list the ones that inspire you the most. I’d like you to pause now and list them. What I want to say is we’ve got macro inspirations, like deep character qualities that move you greatly, ways that they are with you. We have micro inspirations. It could be the way that this person tends to their plants or decorates their house or cooks or takes care of their pets, anything. Macro, micro, think what interactions, what things that you notice in this relationship inspire you the most? The next question is what interactions in this relationship hurt you the most? I want to speak a little bit about both of these before we go any further. There’s something that is existentially important in your answers to these questions. This is why we get the most hurt and the most inspired precisely in the places we care the most. The places we care the most are the dominant themes of our lives and our personality. They are what I call our core gifts. It’s those parts of our psyche that influence our behavior most powerfully. Because they’re so central to our emotional, spiritual DNA, the way we relate to them determines our self-esteem more than almost anything else. It also determines who we’re sexually and romantically attracted to. I speak about that. I’m not going to speak about that in this episode, but it’s something I speak about a lot in my work. If you, or any of us, want to create a useful user’s manual for the relationship you’re focusing on and for you, it’s so important to become increasingly familiar with the answers to those two questions for yourself but also for your loved ones. These tender parts of ourselves and we’re going to get to my asking you the question about the things that hurt the most in a moment. These tender parts of you are highly active in your closest relationships. I call them core gifts. They’re like fingerprints. At first glance, it seems like they’re like everybody else as everyone wants respect, independence, love, safety. We all want those things.

  On closer reflection, we want different facets of those in different ways. What’s important to one person is not as important to the other and vice versa. The things that are highly charged for us, another person might not realize how much these things mean to us. We might not even honor how much they mean to us. That is one of the deepest components of self-love is to recognize the things that are deeply charged for us and matter so much. Learn to hold them with what I call cupped hands with honor, with treasuring.

Your Unique Genius, Your Truest Self

These are the parts of ourselves that feel the most vulnerable. Those are the parts that it feels most urgent that we feel seen, understood and appreciated. There are also parts of ourselves that we are the most easily likely to hide and cover – up because it’s better not to be disappointed. When we do that, we’re living a life that loves bounces off of us instead of having this deep permeability to love. Within these qualities, these things where you get the most hurt, and you feel the most inspiration, lie your unique genius, and also your deepest ability to give and receive love. What I’d like you to do now is think back on your past experiences in this relationship. I want you to think about the moments that you have felt micro hurts or major hurts. These simple moments, as well as the moments of inspiration, can tell you worlds about who you are, who your loved one is and what matters the most to each of you. When we see that in those reflections, there’s a feeling of truth. Not necessarily this sense of grand universal truth, but a sense of personal truth. This touches me where I live. This really does hurt me. This really does cause me to wilt, to shrink, to pull back, to retreat, to be angry, or this really does make my heart feel full and filled, joyful and peaceful. What I’d like you to do now is to take a moment and now think about in this relationship the kind of things that hurt the most, macro and micro. Not for the reason of vilifying this other person, but for the reason of understanding what the hurts are so that you can be a better custodian of your heart in this relationship, and hence in every relationship. Take a few moments to do that. You can again pause the recording. Now I just want you to take a moment and think about the themes that emerged again and again, the things that gave you joy when they were met and honored, the things that caused pain when they were not. When you take the time to notice these themes, it’s like a connect the dots kinds of puzzle. The more you understand and appreciate the precious parts of your loved one, the more they will feel loved and valued by you.CLICK TO TWEETYou connect the themes and you realize that a few themes come up again and again. What emerges is a picture of your truest self. These are the things that matter most in an intimate relationship. It really affects me when someone can’t share their vulnerability and I’m going out on a limb. It really affects me when someone doesn’t stand for me when it’s hard and scary to do that because I do that for other people. When I see someone being brave and creative in the face of adversity, when I see someone being kind, when it would be just as easy, or even easier to be not so kind, these things kill me. They move me so deeply. If you take a moment and think about the things that hurt you the most and the most regularly, and that fills your heart the most regularly, you will begin to see the themes of you, the true colors of you. I want to say something about joy here. It’s something I’ve talked about a lot in different episodes. Often, we pass over our moments of joy instead of relishing them. It’s a journey to be able to comfortably sit with our joys. I know for me that that’s been one of the biggest challenges of my life is being able to bear joy in a quiet, non-quaky way. Often, we feel uncomfortable or unworthy in the face of our moments of expansion or inspiration, then we try to minimize our good feelings like, “Everybody feels the same thing,” or immediately we parry the joy with a self-deprecating way of thinking that minimizes the positive that we just had, because inspiration can frighten us. It makes our defense quake. It invites like a superstitious fear that the other shoe is going to drop. For most of us, we can bear joy only for a few fleeting moments, then it quickly turns into a critique or assessment or analysis. I know that’s true for me. The task of thinking of those small joys, not as nice moments, but as portals to something incredibly precious, incredibly big, incredibly important. That’s a different way to think. We minimize our hurts too. We tell ourselves we’re being too sensitive. We say that all the time or that we’re supposed to be the bigger person. We do not want oversensitivity to make everything worse than it is. We don’t want that. It’s good to be a bigger person when we feel like we can. If we don’t honor our hurts and listen closely to the truths about their relationship and about us that they’re trying to tell us, we are going to keep repeating the same patterns in this relationship again and again. As you learn to listen to the things that feel wrong, you learn to hold and treasure and appreciate and express your appreciation for the things that feel right, your relationship turns richer. If it’s a romantic sexual relationship that opens the door for more sexuality, more sensuality, more embracing a deeper sense of radical intimacy. The same is true of non-sexual, non-romantic relationships, a more radical intimacy where we feel cared for and so willing to go out on a limb for the other person. You’ve done this exercise now. I want to encourage you to allow yourself time to process it and reflect because in going through that, you have now touched on some of the most precious, important and influencing parts of your being. That’s a big thing. You can imagine what would it be like to walk through the world honoring those parts of yourself, the inspirations and the hurts, honoring them more fully and richly.

 

What Is In You That Inspires Others?

We’re moving on to part two of this exercise. This is hard but fabulous. You’re going to redo the same process for your loved one. You’re going to try to place yourself in his or her or their shoes and imagine how he or she, or they would answer the same questions about your relationship. The first one is, what do you think in you inspires this person? Maybe they’ve told you, maybe you have to guess, but take a minute, you can pause this again, and list the things that you think inspire them about you, that they need about you, that they rely on from you, that they look up to, that make them feel safe in the world, that make them feel inspired in the world, that make them feel taken care of. Do that now. This is a good one. It’s hard, but it’s a good one. If this loved one would have to articulate the ways that they felt most hurt in the relationship. I just want to say again this is an invitation to you to take on your most beautiful and important intimacy lessons. I know it’s hard. I know it’s humbling. That’s part of the beauty of this journey because anything you take in and go, “I can see that I have hurt this person I love. I can see that I have missed their cues. I can see that I haven’t seen their deepest self,” all of those things, those are good. Those are gold. When you see that, even though you feel pain, I believe that you will be filled with a sense of goodness and quiet. Because you’ll know that you’re doing the beautiful work of intimacy that you need so much. Take a moment. You can pause the recording and think about this. What would be the micro and even macro hurts that this person would say? Be brave, dive in, take a few moments, minutes, to pause this and then answer those questions. Think again about what this person in your imagination said and what were the themes that emerged again and again. The more you understand and appreciate these precious parts of your loved one, the more this loved one will feel loved and valued by you. The more there’ll be of this hardcore sense of that true growth, that feels so good when you and the other person begin to learn each other’s language and change. As you know, you need to change. There’s almost nothing better than that. The more this happens, the more joy and connection is going to be possible in that relationship. Thank you so much for doing this brave exercise. I imagine you have a lot to think about, a lot to hold and just these simple questions are such an act of grace, “Where is my loved one being hurt? Where are they being inspired? Where am I feeling hurt? Where am I feeling inspired?” They’re such glorious questions. Another gift in them is that you will tap into a native joy inside yourself. The more you do this and live this. I want to say another thing, which is that if some of this stuff is truly deeply wounding for you, that your partner has done or that you have done, that will take more work. That will take more talk. That will take a conversation after conversation. It could take years of work. As they say, relationships are a process of rupture and repair. When we’re willing to do the repair work, that is such a wonderful thing. The more you do this exercise, the deeper your own selflove is going to become. Please try this exercise. You’ve probably just tried it. You can do it again and again, but I’d love it too if you went to DeeperDatingPodcast.com and click Ask Ken and share any experience, any insights, any reflections that you had with this process, with our community. Thank you so much for reading. I look forward to seeing you next week on the Deeper Dating Podcast.

Table of Contents

• • What Is A Part Of You That You Thought You Had To Hide To Make It Through Your Childhood?
  • Who Gave You A Sense Of Hope That There Could Be A Place For This Part Of You To Be Honored, Safe, And Appreciated?
  • How Do You Put Up Walls To Protect This Part Of Yourself?
  • Who In Your Life Today Sees These Parts Of You That Allows You To Feel Safe, Treasured, And Cherished?

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5 Questions That Will Illuminate Your Path To Love

Answer Them As You Listen, And Watch The Shifts Happen Inside

Chip Conley, a brilliant business person and the Founder of the Modern Elder Academy says, “A question thoughtfully conceived can illuminate a room, a company, a life.” Today, I’m going to ask you a few questions that will illuminate your intimacy journey and your search for love. Stay tuned to the Deeper Dating Podcast. — Welcome to the Deeper Dating Podcast. I’m Ken Page. I’m a psychotherapist, the author of the book, Deeper Dating, and of course, the host of this show. I’m happy to have you here today. I’m going to be talking about five questions that will illuminate your search for love in some quite amazing ways. This week and every week, I share with you the greatest tools and insights I know to help you find love, keep it flourishing, and heal your life in the process because the skills of dating are nothing more than the skills of love. If you want to learn more about the deeper dating path to real intimacy, just go to DeeperDatingPodcast.com. If you sign up for my mailing list, you’ll get free gifts and learn more about how to use these ideas to transform your own intimacy journey and you’ll find transcripts of every episode there as well. I also want to say that I am now launching something that you can go to DeeperDating.com to find out about it and what it is, is a whole new way for single people to meet online, in a way that is warm, inspiring, emotionally safe and fun. We’re just beginning, but if you want to go to DeeperDating.com to learn more, we would love to have you be part of this wonderful experiment in a wiser, more inspiring online dating. I also just want to say that everything I share in this podcast is educational in nature. It’s not medical, psychiatric advice or treatment. Finally, I just want to say, if you like what you’re learning here, it would be wonderful if you could subscribe and leave me a review. Thank you so much for that. In this episode, I’m going to ask you five questions. These are questions that are built to help you understand the richest, deepest, most essential themes in your entire intimacy journey and your search for love. With that also, the richest deepest themes in terms of your own journey to selflove and self-understanding. Those are big claims, but you will see as we continue why these claims are very real and very true. What I want to encourage you to do is answer the questions as we go. Whether you’re driving, running, or just sitting down, I would encourage you not to wait because they’re deep questions and you just want to enter into this. We will take you into it deeply, bring you out the other side, and you’ll have pretty glorious insights along the way. Maybe you’re that kind of really organized person that you could say, “I’m going to come back to this and do it later.” I know I’m not that person. My suggestion is not to make a fuss about it, but just jump right in, answer the questions as you go. I’m going to answer some for myself too as an example, and then later, if you want to do it in deeper ways, feel free to do that. One other thing that I just want to say is that part of the questions I’m going to ask are pretty profound. They’re going to be about parts of you that you thought you had to hide, which you are now learning to instead embrace on your intimacy journey. Answer these 5 questions to understand your entire search for love in a new way.CLICK TO TWEETFor some of us though, that entails trauma, and I want to encourage all of you, if you feel these questions could activate trauma responses that are hard to deal with and hard to bear, do this with a therapist or someone who you trust to be able to help you get through this and get to the other side. This is for people who’ve experienced trauma and might have PTSD symptoms around questions like that because we have to honor our places of trauma and we have to protect ourselves and be kind to ourselves. If you’re not sure, you can go along with the process. If you hit a question that just feels like too much, don’t answer it until you can get the support that you need. Let’s jump into these really fabulous questions.

What Is A Part Of You That You Thought You Had To Hide To Make It Through Your Childhood?

We’re, this is going to be very much starting with is when you were younger. We’re going to be doing sets of these illumination questions a lot in the future on this podcast, but now we’re going to start with some childhood stuff and then move it into the present. Here’s a question, “What is a part of you that you thought or felt or believed you had to hide in order to make it through your childhood?” I’ll just give you some examples. For me, there was a quality of intense sensitivity and vulnerability that was like way too gay and mortifying for me, and also not fitting in with what a boy was supposed to be, not fitting in with what a boy was supposed to be in my family of Holocaust survivors and our family ethos about what it meant to be tough in order to survive. This deep sensitivity in me that was explosively loving and extremely tender and very magical was something I had to really protect and hide. I grew a kind of shame around it for myself. That’s me. For you, it might have been a quality of power or fierceness or independence. Maybe a quality of sensitivity. Maybe a creativity that was like wild and careening that got you in trouble, but whatever it was, this kind of like a very essential part of you as a kid that you knew the world was not going to see or get or honor. Take a minute to think about that. You can say your answer out loud if you’re all alone, just do that. Take a minute. You can pause the recording right now and just say your answer or you might want to write it, or you might just want to think it. Again, I encourage you just go for it because you’re going to learn some great things unless it feels too emotionally loaded to be doing right now and then I encourage you to respect that. Do that right now.

Who Gave You A Sense Of Hope That There Could Be A Place For This Part Of You To Be Honored, Safe, And Appreciated?

Here’s the second question, “Who in your childhood gave you a sense of hope that maybe there could be a place for this part of you in the world? Maybe this part of you could be honored, could be safe, could be appreciated, could be mentored, could be empowered?”. Who in your childhood gave you that glimpse, even if they weren’t intensely in your life? Edward Hallowell, who’s just a hero of mine and a brilliant thinker about ADHD, about intimacy. I’ve interviewed him before and I hope to again. He spoke about having a really difficult childhood, but there was one teacher who saw his gifts, and he said, “You know, even just one teacher can be enough to bring somebody into a really rich and good life, even if they didn’t get that from their family of origin.” Maybe it was an imaginary person. Maybe it was someone from history. Maybe it was a saint. Maybe it was someone you invented. Maybe it was a pet. Maybe there was no one though from your childhood that you had that with, but you had it later in your life, but someone with whom this part of you, they got it. You felt like, “This part of me has value. It can be seen. It can live in the world.” Take a minute now and think about who that person is. I’m going to ask you again to pause the recording. You’re going to think who this person is, and then you’re going to do something. It’s something I do a lot. It’s an important part of this illuminating your path process. You’re going to thank this person. You’re going to put words on what it is that they gave you.

  For me, it was a woman named Naomi Sheldon. I was twelve years old. I went to my violin class and she was sitting there. She was older. She was like in her twenties and she had a singing class. She was a poet and she met me and she got that I was a sensitive kid with a big heart. She remembered all the pain that she had been through being that kind of person, but something that she said that intrigued her about me was that I seemed like a pretty happy kid, which may be on some level I was. She wrote a poem about me. We became friends and she became a mentor. She brought me to the theater. She taught me that I could live as an artist. No one had taught that to me before in that way. Even though I came from an art family, but that I could live like an artist. In other words, feeling things that were so deep and so wide and so explosive and so tender that there was space for that and that it was actually a gift. That was me, but I would like you to think who this person is. I’d like you to pause the recording. I would actually like you, out loud or silently, to put words on your gratitude to this person. Tell them what they did for you, how it changed you, and also talk about the part of you that they rescued or allowed and the role that they played. Just take a minute or two to do that or three and then you can start the recording again. Just give yourself that gift because when we know these people who saw what I call our core gifts and let us know that there might be a place for them in the world, that’s really big. That’s really seminal for our life journey. I’m going to talk about why with the next question. Go ahead and do that now. How does that feel? I bet it feels good. It’s a really important thing to do. These intimacy heroes, these core gift heroes in our life. Here’s another thing. I am a student of intimacy walls because I have had so many intimacy walls and still experience my intimacy walls. They really mattered to me because of the loss of love that they cause, which really I feel. I’ve had to do tons of thinking for my own life and then as a therapist and in my intensives, intimacy walls are what I work with. Those are the places where we feel like they’re impenetrable, they’re impermeable. The thing that I want to say and this is a rich formula, whatever it is, that quality was, that you picked out to the degree that you feel like it won’t be cherished, you will put up walls. These walls will be what they call primitive defenses, meaning that they’re frozen, they’re automatic. It’s like a deep down part of ourselves that does it to protect us. The more we treasure these parts of ourselves, the more we’re brave enough to live them in the world more freely, of course, appropriately, and in ways that are safe because it can be a scary world. The more that we inside ourselves have rid ourselves of shame and celebrate these wild, sensitive, passionate parts of ourselves, the more we do that, the less we will need primitive walls against love. The more shame we have over these parts of ourselves, the more we will erect walls against love that we won’t have control over. The more we rid ourselves of shame and celebrate our wild, sensitive, passionate parts, the less we need walls against love.CLICK TO TWEET

“How Do You Put Up Walls To Protect This Part Of Yourself?”

That’s a question that I want to ask now and this is first iteration. Maybe you’ve thought about this a lot before but if not, don’t worry about it. This is first iteration. You’ll be thinking about this a lot more, I imagine, afterwards. You can see that these questions illumine your whole life story in a way. How would you put up walls to protect this part of you? When you were younger, when you were older, when you date, how would you in the past, how do you even maybe now put up walls to protect this part of yourself? Because it’s smart to protect this part of yourself. The more you learn how to dignify it and champion it and honor it, and be amazing enough to stand behind it, even when the world doesn’t get it, the less you will need walls, until then we need walls. As we grow, the conscious journey is to deconstruct the primitive walls and create and rewire new ways of behaving that honor and treasure these beautiful parts of ourselves, and then only choose people and situations where these parts of ourselves can grow and flourish and shine. Take a minute to think about this one. How do you put up walls to protect this part of you? You can pause the recording and just kind of speak it out again.

Who In Your Life Today Sees These Parts Of You That Allows You To Feel Safe, Treasured, And Cherished?

I know this is a deep one, folks. Next question. This is a wonderful question. “Who in your life today sees these parts of you, allows you to feel safe revealing these parts of you, treasures and cherishes these parts of you, respects these parts of you?” I want you to just think of those people and I want you to thank them. We’re going to do the same thing again. You can just pause the recording and speak it out loud or write it or think it. I want you to just think of some of those people. If there is no one like that, I have two suggestions for you. The first suggestion is when we’re not used to people like that, we sometimes don’t recognize or notice them. They’re like invisible because they’re so different from what we picture life is really like so we don’t recognize it. I’d like you to think in your Facebook friends, in whatever kind of contact list you have, I know for me, this was a really big and important question. I had to look back through my current and past life to find out who were the people with whom these parts of me felt safe because I had to develop a taste for those people because for me, I thought they weren’t spicy enough. I thought that they weren’t exciting enough. There was an excitement wiring that happened to me around people that didn’t really accept me. It’s a deep internalization of the people who stepped on these parts of me and the parts of me that believed that they were right to do that. I had to relearn like, “Who are these people?” Maybe they didn’t seem so spicy at first, but maybe I would find that their edge came from their intelligence, or their fierceness in living, or their deep integrity. There were other kinds of edges or their radical gentleness, even when it’s hard to be gentle. There were other things that could be really exciting and spicy for me and I could learn to develop a taste for those people. I’m just sharing my story because when I finally did that, that my world became filled with love.

  Take a minute now and think who were the people, just think of 1 or 2 people who really stand out for you, just at this moment and thank them, articulate what they give you with this and thank them and just do that. I mean, you’ll love this because it feels so good to do this. If you’re someone who still says, even after reflecting back on other people, you might not have noticed that there’s no one, then your work is in front of you because I promise you that those people are there and that they are your path to happiness. Your work is to find them and you might need help and support to do that. Take a minute now, press pause and go ahead and enjoy that.

How Could You Allow This Part Of You More Of Its Genius In The World?

Now, we are on our fifth and last question, and the question is this. “How could you allow this part of you more of its genius in the world? How can you allow this part of you more dignity in the way that you live?” More leadership because this part, I believe, is connected to your mission and to your greatness and to your capacity for magic in this world. The messages that come from this part of you are messages that the world is hungry to hear, or at least parts of the world are hungry to hear. Their messages and ways of being that when you find your one, that person is going to feel like they found home because of these very parts of you. Take a minute and just think, “How could I let the genius of this part come out more? How can I treasure this kid inside me more? How can I give this wild, kind of very unique, very different, very challenging, but very amazing child inside of me freedom to really create and to be and to live in a bigger, richer way?” Take a minute and pause and just put words on that. Those were your questions and I imagine that they’re going to be questions that are going to ripple and bang around and rock around and just touch you and affect you and affect your thinking and help you understand your path or one aspect of your path and your journey just a little bit more richly. It was a joy to get to do this with you. I want to encourage you to go to DeeperDatingPodcast.com and click on Ask Ken, and you can leave a message about what this exercise brought up for you or what you learned from it. I always love hearing that. Some of those, I might read out actually in the podcast. Thank you so much and I look forward to seeing you on the next episode of the Deeper Dating Podcast.

Table of Contents

• Online Dating
• The Swipe Generation
• Online Dating Behaviors
• Slowing Down

Watch the episode here:

3 Powerful Hacks To Help You Find Love Online

Online dating is a powerful way to meet many new people, but it sculpts behavior that actually leads usp away from real intimacy. Stay tuned to this episode to learn how that happened and how you can extract the good from your online dating experience and avoid the harmful. — Hello, everybody and welcome to the Deeper Dating Show. I’m Ken Page and I’m a psychotherapist, the author of the book, Deeper Dating, and the host of this show. I’m glad to have you here. Today, we’re going to talk about really transformative hacks that you can use to change your experience in online dating. This week and every week, I’m going to share the greatest tools that I know to help you find love, keep it flourishing, and heal your life in the process because the skills of dating are the skills of intimacy and those are certainly the greatest skills of all for a happy and rich life. If you want to learn more about this approach, you can go to DeeperDatingPodcast.com. Online dating sculpts behaviors in us that actually push love away. Here's how to change that.CLICK TO TWEETThere you can get transcripts of every episode. You can learn lots more about my work and hear about other ways to work with me and other people’s work that I really respect. I want to say that everything I talk about here is educational in nature. It is not medical or psychiatric advice, and if you’re experiencing any serious psychiatric or psychological symptoms or conditions, please seek professional help. Also, I want to say that it is greatly appreciated. There are such beautiful, amazing reviews on iTunes and elsewhere, and I thank you so much. If anybody would be interested in leaving a review, that’s always a tremendous gift.

Online Dating

We’re going to jump right in. In 1995, that was the advent of online dating. With that advent, the world changed. The number of matches that people can experience is different now than it was in the old days. The numbers are huge. They’re vast. I think there are something like over 18,000 swipes a second on Tinder and billions of matches made over time on all of the different sites, literally billions. The number of matches is astounding that we can now have access to. Interestingly, in 1995, about 42% of Americans were single. Now, 45% are single according to Pew and according to the census. Obviously, there are a lot of different conditions that relate to that. There’s a lot more cohabitation that goes up consistently. There are social factors that change things as well. However, the number is so significant of how many matches are made and it’s so significant how fewer marriages there are now. That’s got to say something and we need to look at why. I think a big part of why is because online dating excels in generating matches and it fails miserably in creating an environment of real intimacy. What is intimacy? As I understand, an environment of intimacy that will help people meet is a quality of warmth in the interaction, quality of emotional safety in the interactions, and in the platform, a sense of fun because fun is a big deal and a sense of inspiration.

 

The Swipe Generation

Somehow, there’s some kind of structure where you can get to see the best parts of people and show them the best parts of you. I’ve been working very hard with my husband to create an alternative site that allows that, and we’ve just launched. It’s called DeeperDating.com. Do feel free to visit that site because that’s going to be growing. I want to talk about this dilemma in online dating. I want to talk about it from two different perspectives. I want to talk about it from the perspective of the swipe generation. I was quoted in the Times a while back about what I call swipe circuitry. I’m going to talk about that in a minute. I’m going to talk about those of us who awere using swipe apps, some of the pitfalls, and how to get around those pitfalls because they’re significant and they’re illustrative. They teach us something important about intimacy. I want to talk to all of the folks that are not using swipe apps and websites, particularly people who are a little bit older because we have a very different experience. I’m almost 64 and I’m married, but I relate. We have a very different online experience than people in their 20s and 30s. I was just listening to some research about this. It turns out that 70% of college students who use Tinder have literally never met anybody and they haven’t wanted to because some huge percentage does Tinder, does theise swiping apps for two kinds of blended reasons, boredom, and distraction. That’s one reason and the other reason is a kind of dopamine drip like the kind of self-confidence boosting feelings of having somebody express interest in you. That’s the level of removal that we are living at. I’m going to talk about that in a little bit. I think that also as we get older, we don’t experience so much this wild, insane proliferation of matches. As we experienced not enough good matches and a kind of dry terrains or just like a lot of jerks out there or people just looking for hookups, which everybody experiences in online dating. I want to talk about all of these situations, these two major categories, and I want to offer some tools and some insights that kind of universalize into the entire intimacy journey. First, I’m going to talk a little bit about what it’s like for those of us who are getting older and are not doing that swipe thing. The truth is as you get older when you reach a certain age, you do not get as many matches. That’s not true for everyone, but it’s true for a lot of people. I want to acknowledge that as a reality. I want to say two things. One thing is that as we get older and we’re using online dating, which is a great thing to use, it’s really important to look for and try a number of different sites. Particularly as we get older, we get kind of clearer on what we want and what we don’t want and we want sites that help us filter. This is for everybody, by the way. We want sites that help us filter things like values, passions, interests, involvement in the world, things that show a deeper character. Some websites allow you to do that kind of searching for deeper values and passions and interests. That’s a great thing. You want to look for that. Even the giant behemoth sites like Match allows you to do a lot of different filtering and you really do want to do that. Online dating tries to sculpt a world of numbers, immediacy, and superficiality. It works as a business model. It works because it keeps people interested and we need to use the tremendous gift of online dating, which is the number of possible matches and connections, but we want to do it in a wiser way. We want to occupy and take back the online dating experience to extract the value from it. This is the meta point that I want to make and it’s around all of this. Everything is kind of a microcosm of a bigger picture of how we do things. How we eat tells us a lot about who we are. How we relate to people tells us a lot about who we are. How we date online tells us a lot about who we are. We’re interfacing with an environment that in some ways brings out our most immature and superficial qualities because it focuses so much on numbers. That’s very illuminating because we can see, “What am I doing in online dating that is not from my place of deepest intimacy, that is not from the place of my core gifts or my gifts zone?” Whatever that is, is going to work infinitely less well. As we get older, we get clearer on what we want and what we don't want.CLICK TO TWEETWe can all, just like we can do in any arena of our life, and this is an incredibly worthy thing to do is to say, and this for everybody, “How am I using online dating in a way that is acting out some patterns and some habits that I know are not my highest good, are not my highest self?” Maybe they’re based in a judgmental ness or impatience or irritation or a quick sexualization of experiences. Whatever it is, all of us can look at it because we all have clay feet when it comes to love. All of us do. Those of us that can admit it areis gold because that’s just an act of growth and commitment to goodness, and that commitment to see the ways in which our habits keep us away from love or don’t allow love to flourish. That’s intimacy greatness when we do that, and that’s the main ingredient that’s going to keep our relationship alive as things get difficult and rocky. Harville Hendrix, a teacher whose work I deeply respect. He says, “There comes a time in every relationship where the thing you most need from your partner is the thing that they are least able to give you.” Often, we think that’s the end of love, but it’s not. It’s the beginning of love. That’s the beginning of the deep character shift work that both of you do together that creates a future that’s based on solidity, commitment, integrity, and the wonder of mutual growth. Every way in which you have clay feet, every way in which you’re doing online dating in a way that is not the most intimate, those are things to notice because if you address them here guaranteed in your next relationship, in their own iteration, they will show up in different ways and you will have gained skills to address that.

Online Dating Behaviors

What are some things that people do in online dating? What are some examples of this? Having worked with so many clients and havings been aon online datering for so many years, I think that one thing that happens is we get jaded. I think that’s a huge thing. The research here by the way is interesting. It says that, “Because of the huge quantity of connections possible in online dating, our behavior is sculpted so that we are less likely to really appreciate and value the people we meet because there are so many more people ahead of us.” This is a very silly example, but I think it relates. A while back, we‘re able to get a whole bunch of Clorox wipes for the house. We were hoarding every Clorox wipe at the beginning of this pandemic like, “We’re going to be so careful with it. We’re going to use it again.” All of a sudden, we got in this shipment of Clorox wipes, which at that point was kind of a little miracle. All of a sudden, the packs started disappearing. My husband said to me, “This is thean abundance problem.” I said, “Yeah, it’s true. We are treating these Clorox wipe packages as so much less precious because we have so many of them now.” That’s human behavior, but when human behavior melds with an environment that is built to keep putting new people in front of us to the degree that people actually, and I think most of us or all of us know this experience, of looking around but only being half there. If somebody doesn’t call us immediately because they’re really hot, sexy, spicy or attractive, we move on. Picture that you’re at a party with a small number of people and you’re sitting on the sofa. There are 4 or 5 people around you. Remember those days when we were doing that. Let’s say one of the people is someone who you might be able to be interested in. You’re watching them. You’re noticing them. They wouldn’t have instantly appealed to you, but there are qualities in this person that you find sexy, funny, or wonderful. You noticed this person because it’s just a few people. You never would have noticed this in a big crowd. The same thing happens in online dating, but at any given point, there are vast numbers of people. When people don’t super spark our interest, we move on. When we’re bored and we’re just trying to get a little tiny dopamine drip going, we move on, we move on, we move on. When we don’t move on and we reach out to someone and they respond back, a lot of different things could happen. One is now it’s becoming work. Now, it’s gone from, “La la la,” just like looking through who’s going to be amazing. All of a sudden, it’s work because it’s work to meet a new person. Unless they’re completely your exact type and research shows that often those people turn you on that much because they embody in part the worst characteristics of your primary caregivers, and you’re wanting to go back to the scene of the original crime to finally get loved right. Barring those people, those super exciting total, like, hotties, we often bypass people.

Slowing Down

We don’t take the time because there are all of a sudden so many choices that we could make and this is a powerful online dating hack. It’s to slow down. It’s something I’ve talked about before, but I’m going to be talking about it in a little bit of a different way now. Slowing down because every one of those people who isare anywhere in the range of, “Maybe if I liked this person’s voice, I could be attracted,” or “If this person had a nice body, I could be attracted,” or “If this person was smart, I could be attracted,” or who knows what? In other words, people who, like, you don’t instantly know, “I’m totally hot for this person,” but somewhere potentially in the ballpark. You feel like, “If I really liked them, I could picture they’re in the terrain where there could be a spark.” All of those people, we don’t have time for, we bypass them because it takes work to reach out. It takes work, ito takes vulnerability. It takes work to set up a phone call. It takes work to set up a date and God knows these days, it takes more work to do that. What I encourage is that we slow down and we look for character qualities because, I’m telling you, and I’ve said this before,. Wwhen we make the choice that we are only going to be with someone who inspires us with their goodness, their integrity, and their solidity, our world changes, and future changes. There are some smart people who know that, to begin with. Usually, they’re the ones who are in good relationships, but there are the rest of us that don’t know that. We think we know it, but we learned that we need more discrimination. That’s why I teach the main question being, “Does my soul feel safe with this person?” I get emails from people all the time thanking me for this one particular insight and this was actually the insight that Oprah excerpted from my book. It’s that we’re looking for circuitries of attraction of inspiration, where we’re attracted to someone, but we’re also attracted because of their character, their goodness, their decency, their presence, their availability, their willingness to be present.

  When you find somebody like that and they’re good, decent and they’re interested in you, that’s happiness in love. Sometimes it doesn’t feel quite as spicy in the beginning. Sometimes it feels wonderful, but then as you see the person’s not going anywhere and they’re really interested and they’re just playing decent, you start thinking that they’re boring. This is a deep one for me and I was single for decades because of that. What I came to realize is that that initial feeling of what I call boringness, which is the lack of an edge, a scary edge, if it’s replaced by fierce, and brave, integrity, creativity, intelligence, intrepid ways of thinking and communicating and living. In other words, if there is some edge there, but it’s like a fabulous, healthy, adventurous edge instead of a cocky, nasty superior edge, which I used to be drawn to all the time. As we learn to change our tastes, our future changes. It’s important that we use our online dating experience to do that as well. That means a few things. It means slowing down. It means filtering for these qualities that interest you. It means that when you’re biding time or wasting time, you realize that everyone you’re bypassing could have been one of those 4 or 5 people on the sofa that you could have ended up having a relationship with. These are all precious beings and when you can slow down enough to say, “I’m going to have to go slower here. I’m going to start by filtering to make my odds better. I’m going to slow down and I’m going to see the human being here. I’m going to budget the time because we have to budget the time to meet these people. I’m going to try not to drop the ball and get to know them.” You will know pretty quickly if the person has qualities of integrity. You will know if they have qualities of jerkiness. You’ll know that really quickly. If they pass that gate, you’ll get to the next gate. You’ll communicate with them. You’ll see what kind of beings they are. If they inspire you if they touch you if you like what they say, and then you’ve gotten to the next gate. I want to say that younger people who are doing swipe circuitry and older folks who are doing more like websites, all of us have to do the same thing. We have to see, “What are the kinds of predispositions I’m going in with that block intimacy?” Why don’t you take a minute, everybody, and just think? You should be able to figure this out, “What am I doing that is not of the highest place of intimacy? Because I get so seduced by the numbers and immediacy of online dating or I’m jaded, annoyed, and disappointed that I go in with a wall up. I go in and don’t put the time in or the care and I let people go.” These are all huge learnings. You might want to just take a minute and think about what’s true for you. This is how we gain wisdom. I’m telling you that that wisdom changes our future in love. If you can figure out some ways that you could bring a little more wisdom and a little less habituated, unhelpful behavior to your online dating, you will see a difference. I want to hear about what that difference is, so you could go to DeeperDatingPodcast.com, you can click “Ask Ken” and you can leave a message. I get wonderful messages and questions from people who are using these simple, basic intimacy, wisdom techniques, and seeing shifts happen and having questions about what comes next. I want to encourage people to do that. I want to hear from you. What did you learn about what you could do differently in your online dating experience? How we relate to people and how we date online tell us a lot about who we are.CLICK TO TWEETThat’s going to help so many people and I’m going to share the things I hear. Everybody who could do that, I would so appreciate it. Call in, you can use this “Ask Ken” icon in DeeperDatingPodcast.com. You could speak whatever it is that you want to say about where you get stuck. What are some habituated patterns that haven’t been helping you? What are you trying differently and how is it working? Because that’s going to be crowdsourced intimacy gold. Thank you all for reading. As always, it’s a joy to get to connect with you. I look forward to seeing you in the next episode. I encourage you to go to DeeperDatingPodcast.com,  join my mailing list, leave a review if you like. Have a wonderful week.

Table of Contents

• • Our Intuition
  • What Do We Do When We’re Stuck
  • When To Distrust Your Intuition
  • Getting Help

Watch the episode here:

How To Discover Your Greatest Resource In Your Search For Love

And How To Know When To Distrust It!

What’s the single greatest resource for us in our search for love? What’s the one big risk in trusting that resource? Stay tuned to the Deeper Dating Podcast to learn more. — Hello and welcome to the Deeper Dating Podcast. I’m Ken Page. I’m a psychotherapist, the author of the book, Deeper Dating, the host, of course, of this podcast and the Cofounder of Deeper Dating Online. I am so glad to be here with you. Today, we’re going to be talking about the single greatest resource in your search for love, and the one risk in trusting that resource. Lots more on that in a minute. Every week, I’m going to be sharing with you the greatest skills and insights I know to help you find love, keep it flourishing and heal your life in the process because the skills of dating are nothing more than the skills of love. If you want to learn more about this approach, just go to DeeperDatingPodcast.com to get a transcript of this, and every other episode, and to join my mailing list and get a free gift. I also want to say that this is not medical or psychiatric advice or treatment. I also want to say that if you like what you’re hearing here, it would be a wonderful thank you to subscribe and to leave me a review. Thank you for that and let’s jump in.

Our Intuition

I really do think that the single greatest resource that we have in our search for love is our gut-level sense of what feels right and what feels wrong. It’s a powerful and profound thing, how we don’t listen to that and some of the voices that we have inside us that tell us not to listen to our discrimination. Our voices like these, “You’re too sensitive. You want too much. You ask for too much. You’re not strong enough. You’re not feminine enough. You’re not masculine enough.” All of the different voices that we use that are an act of quiet violence against our being and against our discrimination. What we see in our country today is a vast amount of people not trusting the discrimination voice inside of them that says, “Our administration is corrupt, is unsafe, is being led by a narcissist with values that I would never, never want to teach my children.” I see this in so many ways and in so many different dimensions in my role as a coach and as a therapist. So many times, people are in relationships that are what I call attractions of deprivation. I hear the same lines, “But he was only joking, he didn’t mean that. But other partners would do worse things. He’s better than my last partner. No, I think I’m just too sensitive. No, I know he shouldn’t have acted that way or she, shouldn’t have acted that way, or they, shouldn’t have acted that way, but I also know that I did this and that to spark that bad behavior.” All of the ways that we oppress ourselves when our guts say, “Something is wrong here with the person I’m dating in terms of their character.” This is something I say all the time. I quote Hara Marano, my dear friend and the advice columnist of Psychology Today, when she says, “There are three Cs that we need to remember that are keys to finding healthy love. Those are Character, Character and Character.” We feel it inside when there’s a sneakiness. We feel it when there’s dishonesty. We feel it when there’s a cutting-edge of coldness or cruelty, even if it’s subtle. With some people, they’re very skilled at demeaning us. It almost feels like a paper cut where when it happens, you don’t even feel it but afterwards, you go back and you realize that really stung. Just like with a paper cut, you might not feel it right away but then you realize it’s stinging.  Our discrimination tells us so much more than we give ourselves credit for. In dating, how do we know when to trust our feelings and when they lead us astray?CLICK TO TWEETWhat I’ve been talking about in this portion has been our discrimination of what doesn’t feel right. There’s also our discrimination about what does feel right. What does feel like what I call an attraction of inspiration? An attraction of inspiration is one in which you’re not hooked because you’re trying to get the other person to behave better or love you fully. You’re hooked because of the person’s goodness and decency, because of how they inspire you, with how they treat you and who they are in the world and that is quite simply the path to happiness and love. It’s very binary. When we choose integrity, goodness and generosity over sneakiness and dishonesty, selfishness, lack of ability to give and lack of ability to commit. When we make that decision that we are only going to choose those qualities of inspiration, only, only, only. First of all, it’s brave as hell because all the voices come up that say, “Then I’ll never be with anybody,” but the truth is that when we tell ourselves that, what we’re really saying is, “I have to go against the intuition and judgment that I have inside, that cringes at certain things, that feels really off about certain things, that knows I don’t want to be treated in this way. There’s a grave, grave kind of repercussion to dishonoring our own gut-level sense of what feels good and what doesn’t feel good. When we make the decision that we are only going to pursue people of wonderful character who treat us really well, who make our hearts and souls feel safe. I promise you, no matter what your age, no matter what your life circumstance, I promise you that those people are out there. When you make that commitment and you shut the door to the things that just feel off in terms of character to you, and you only search for the things that feel inspiring in terms of character integrity, availability, when you make that choice, your future changes. Those are the people who you meet, who years later, still are so in love with their partner and it’s mutual. You feel the joy and the amazingness of what they’ve created. Those are attractions of inspiration. Those are the only ones that can last and grow in that beautiful, beautiful way and we’ve all seen both kinds of relationships. There’s also a grander, more meta-level of this, which is that when we learn to dignify those things that make our heart feel safe and we learn to discriminate around the things that make our heart feel unsafe. When we learn that skill, we finally understand our core gifts. We finally understand our unique genius. We finally find a user’s manual to this ongoing, absolute, beautiful mystery of who we are. There are certain arenas where we cannot trust our intuition or discrimination as well and I’m going to be talking about those in a few moments, but I want to say more about this way of living that I’m talking about. This way of dating and this way of looking for love and building love and being intimate because in an intimate relationship, there’s a constant process of what’s called rupture and repair.

We cannot repair the micro and sometimes the macro ruptures that happen in an intimate relationship if we can’t trust ourselves and find words for what doesn’t feel right. Here’s another thing. When we don’t trust ourselves about what doesn’t feel right, it’s a kind of violence against our authentic self. Violence begets violence. It’s either going to be violence against our self where we trust ourselves less and less and sabotage ourselves in a variety of related ways and/or we become passive-aggressive like that thing of pushing a beach ball down and it’s just underwater and it just doesn’t stay down forever. Our needs and our truth still get spoken, but they don’t get spoken with kindness and clarity. Without kindness, we meet resistance and wounding. Without clarity, we are profoundly weakened when we can’t speak the truth of what we’re experiencing. It’s that beautiful thing that I say all the time from the 12-Step Program, “Say what you mean, mean what you say, and don’t say it mean.” There’s a lifetime of learning. just in that. These are the things that happen when we dishonor our discrimination. Here’s an exercise that I talk about a lot that you can do anywhere and everywhere, but you can certainly do it on a date., Which is you’re with someone and here’s what’s going to happen. Your head is going to be having whatever chatter it has, and that chatter is going to be focusing on something different or focusing on a whole range of different things, some valuable, some less valuable. When you drop down from the chatter into the place of, “What am I feeling in my inside? What am I feeling deep down? What’s the weather like inside my heart, in my interactions with this person?” We noticed that there’s going to be vastly valuable information when we drop down to that level, and that’s that level of deeper discrimination in our connecting with other people. What Do We Do When We’re Stuck Now, I’m going to talk about something that is another kind of aspect of our intuition that’s a huge, huge deal, and that is, what do we do when we’re stuck in our dating life? What do we do when we’re stuck in our romantic life? What do we do when we’re stuck in a relationship? Of course, we’re going to get stuck in all those ways lots of different times because this is life. It’s supposed to happen and it’s at those crossroads that wisdom is built and created, or defensive patterns are reenacted and strengthened. What we want to do at those charged crossroads is enact new patterns based on wisdom, truth, self- honoring and kindness to our self and to other people. It’s a whole rewiring that’s so preciously important, but it’s not easy to do. This is the piece of intuition where when we live in a way that we’re honoring who we are, we are permeable to the breezes of inspiration and insight and intuition that we wouldn’t otherwise be. We’re walking down the street and we’re in this place, which I call the gift zone, where we’re connected to the beating heart of our humanity. We don’t have to be right there, but we’re not too far from it, and that’s the magic zone. That’s the zone where amazing things come from. We’re walking down the street and we’re in that zone, and we have an insight about someone we love. We have an insight about our career. We have an insight about our health. In that kind of space where there is space, where we’re somewhat focused but also just in a kind of looser place. There’s just a lot of wisdom that can come at those moments. When we're frightened, our fear masks itself as intuition.CLICK TO TWEETI actually teach a process in Episode Three, which I call perhaps the greatest practice of all to help you speed your path to love. It’s called the Inner Mentor Process™. It’s a beautiful process to tap into that deeper wisdom, to those kinds of breezes of inspiration. I do it every day and it helps me to get out of struggle focus and into gift focus. Every day, it reminds me of the good things. It reminds me of the through-line of what I’m trying to create. Today, I was thinking that kind of my life is I like to lead it like doing Parkour, which God knows I can’t do, but that experience of kind of having a gap between you and what you want and you have to jump to the nearest ledge of what feels right and good. There’s this leaping that has to happen when you’re creating your own path in the world because there’s not a path marked for you. You have to leap from inspiration to inspiration. I think for me, that’s a wisdom lesson that I learned just today from my inner mentor about how to live my life around certain big professional choices that I’m making now. I deeply encourage you to listen to Episode Tthree. In a nutshell, what it is, is picturing the person you are born to be like the unfolded you. The you on the other side of all of your inner glass ceilings. This evolved enlightened version of you. You picture that you and then you do a fantasy where you become that you, and then from that place, you look at the you of today and you call out messages of guidance and wisdom from the heart of that place. I can pretty much promise you that you will bypass almost every drop of self-criticism and the streaming messages that you will get will be just beautiful. I do encourage you to check that out if you’d like to do that. All of this is under the category of being able to listen for inspiration, because life is so hard and love is so hard and love is again made up of so many challenges and conundrums, and encounters where you and the person you’re with are speaking very different languages. This is so much the heart of love. If we can kind of jump in that Parkour kind of way from our moments of inspiration, “I get what was going on there,” or “I see what was in their heart that I didn’t see before,” or “Now, I see why I felt the way I felt. I’m honoring that. I’m understanding it.” These are the messages of inspiration. No matter how good your dating coach might be, no matter how good your therapist might be, and I say this as a dating coach and as a therapist, I don’t think there’s anything to match the native beauty of your inner mentor and your own inner intuition.

When To Distrust Your Intuition

Now, I want to say something about when it’s a little riskier to trust those voices. When it’s riskier to trust those voices is when there is trauma, when there’s really highly, highly charged material. Absolutely, if there are any untreated or undertreated psychiatric conditions and absolutely, where there are addictions. These are places where, as wonderful as our intuition is, it can’t necessarily be trusted. I’ll share one story with you. In the early days of AIDS, I was so worried that I was infected and I was way too afraid to get tested because it was a death sentence then. It was scary and I was young. Of course, it was deeply terrifying, but I was too afraid to get tested

I remember one night having a dream, and in this dream, I saw a bottle that was filled with the HIV virus tipping into my body and I knew that the retrovirus had begun its actions inside my body. I knew this so deeply. I felt it down to my bones. Now, I ended up being HIV negative, but when I woke up that morning I felt like, “Man, this was my intuition. This couldn’t have been anything other than my intuition.” When we’re frightened like that, our fear masks itself as intuition. When we’ve been traumatized, if there’s an arena where there’s trauma, and all of us have been traumatized to different degrees, and they say that there’s ‘small t’ trauma and ‘large T’ Trauma. All of us have had a lot of ‘small t’ small trauma and many of us have had ‘large T’ large Trauma in our lives. One of the hallmarks of trauma is that our thinking is impaired when we’re in the throes of that trauma. It’s like when you hit your funny bone and your entire being is activated. You can’t really think straight for a moment. I mean that’s a very benign example of what PTSD is like or what it’s like to feel the reverberations of trauma because that’s such a deep, deep thing. When we’re experiencing trauma, that’s a place where our intuition will be shut down. One of the hallmarks of trauma is black and white thinking. If you find you’re stuck in a place of deep either/or thinking, there’s probably some trauma there. In intimacy, so many of us have been sexually abused or violated or had boundaries crossed and so for so many of us, there’s trauma in that way. So many of us have been traumatized by our cultures and attitude towards sex. So many of us have been traumatized around our gender identity, our sexual orientation. These are all the arenas where there’s a lot of trauma and where there’s trauma, our natural capacity to hear real wisdom is dramatically reduced. In the 12-Step Program, they call these areas neighborhoods in your mind where it’s not safe to be alone and that’s what these spaces are. These are spaces where we cannot really trust our own judgment and we know because we’re triggered. When we’re highly triggered, that’s the time not to listen to our gut or our intuition, but to know that in the majority of cases at a time like that, our thinking will be skewed by our trauma. Our thinking will be skewed by an intensity of charge that we have around a particular subject. In psychotherapeutic terms, they call that overdetermined. It’s got extra pressure toward a certain direction. There’s another arena as well and I’ll talk in a minute about what to do about this, because we all have many areas like this, and it’s an act of wisdom to know, “Maybe here, I can trust my intuition and there, I need to get some help and support.” Another arena is in the arena of addiction. If we have any significant addictions, we will not be able to trust our thinking or our actions until we address that and become sober and not what they call white- knuckling sober, but sober with support. Because what happens in those cases is that every time, we hit a point of rupture, we instantly go back to whatever the substance or behavior is to help kind of medicate our pain and our suffering. When we do that, we rely on that defense instead of having that deeper learning and growth of repair that has to happen. 90% of people who try to change an entrenched behavior fail. The people who succeed are the ones who have a community of support.CLICK TO TWEETFor anybody who’s listening to this, who’s been saying, “I think I drank too much. I think I smoked too much weed. I think I have like maybe a porn addiction or a gambling addiction.” I would have to say that the greatest act of love that you could give yourself almost before anything else is to get help. I personally deeply believe in the 12-Step Program. I think they’re incredible and supportive, and I recommend them to my clients all the time, and I’ve used them in my own life. I think they are a beautiful, beautiful wisdom path, but there are many different paths out there. That’s something to be aware of. I say this to people all the time, if you have an active addiction, all of the lessons that I teach here won’t stick. You’ll end up back where you were because your thinking is not and your intuition will not be reliable or trustable. I’m not trying to be a Debbie Downer here, but I just think these are important, important empowerment principles to really know. For all the places where we are just highly charged, the secret is to find, and there’s research on this that makes this really clear and really explains why this is, but the secret is to find a path around this stuck area that makes sense to you and feels wise and true, and then follow that path, but not alone, with support, with professional support, with peer support. Follow that path with support so that you can fail again and again and again in the company of caring people, and then pick yourself up and rewire again and again and again.

Getting Help

Ninety percent of people who try to change an entrenched behavior fail. The people who succeed are the ones most often who have a template that they believe in and some kind of community of support where they can kind of screw up and explore, screw up and explore. That could be as simple as a buddy that you check in with. In my book, Deeper Dating, and in all of my courses, I always encourage people to have a learning partner because the deeper dating process is a kind of very systematized journey of learning the deeper, wiser approach to finding love, but it’s too hard for most of us to do it alone. I just want to say the vast importance of getting help, even though you just feel like, “Let me try again. This time, I know I can do it with my willpower,” but really, really, really, almost never. Willpower, when it comes to an entrenched pattern, is one of the weakest tools in our toolbox. As I always say, also for any of you who are experiencing significant psychiatric conditions that, I don’t mean mild anxiety, mild depression, I mean kind of more serious conditions that don’t feel stabilized. Please get the help that you need to stabilize those conditions because whatever path you choose to take because until you do, you’re going to keep reverting back to old patterns and you won’t be able to help that. These were the caveats, but they’re good caveats because they’re all about getting wisdom and support at those junctures where you know you need help. You will know, I think in many cases where your intuition has something really good to say because it’ll fill you with the sense of strength, wholeness. You’ll really sense that you’re not running away from the truth. There might even be like a salty kind of nitty-gritty quality of reality to it, but there’s a sense of hope and there’s a sense of direction. It gives you a fullness inside but you know it’s not hiding from reality fullness. It’s a fullness that really feels like a gift. When you feel that, it’s that richness. It’s a kind of very dimensional, wonderful feeling of richness inside, of intuition, of inspiration, of a connection to yourself. When you feel that, that is a really great thing and the guidance that you get in most cases will be really, really helpful. With the things that I described, the addiction, the psychiatric conditions, which are unstabilized or undertreated, the things that you might think are intuition often just feel like fear or defensiveness, or you feel really prickly, or you feel really reactive. Now, it doesn’t mean that you might not be right to feel those things, but what it does mean is that this is a place to get help. That’s a great thing of wisdom to know when we can trust and connect to this beautiful streaming sense of intuition and where we know that we’re just kind of screwed up and we really, really need the support of the people we love. I think those are the wisdom paths. I want to encourage all of you to take on this concept of tapping into the wisdom place in you. The place where you’re connected to the warmth and the beating heart of your humanity. Perhaps the inner mentor process where you envision the you that you’re meant to be, and you call out guidance from that place. The more that you trust those breezes of inspiration that you feel like, “My God, I’m getting something here. Something just opened up. I see something new. I have a new sense of hope.” The more you trust those and the more you create processes that allow for those pockets of inspiration, the richer your life will be, the more love there will be, and the more successful that you will be in your intimacy journey. Thanks so much for listening. I look forward to seeing you on the next episode of the Deeper Dating Podcast.

Table of Contents

• • Growing As A Person
  • Looking For Love
  • Questions To Help You Think Why You’re Stuck
  • Questions That Will Help Explain Your Stuck Point

Watch the episode here:

How To Know If You’re Progressing In Your Search For Love

These Key Markers Will Show You Where You’re Progressing In Your Search For Love

How can you tell if you’re progressing in your intimacy journey? This episode will give you markers and tools to figure out your own answer to this really important question. So stay tuned to the Deeper Dating Podcast, — Hello and welcome to the Deeper Dating Podcast. I’m Ken Page, and I’m a psychotherapist, author of the book “deeper Dating” and the host of this podcast. Today I’m going to be talking about how you can know if you are progressing in your intimacy journey. This week and every week I’m going to share with you the greatest tools that I know to help you find love, grow love, and heal your life in the process. The skills of dating are nothing more than the skills of love. We know that those are the most important skills of all for a happy and meaningful life. If you want to know more about the deeper dating path to real intimacy, go to DeeperDatingPodcast.com. You can sign up for my mailing list, get free gifts, and also get complete transcripts of every episode. We have created an online event for people to meet based on the deeper values and skills that we talk about in this program. It’s warm, emotionally safe, fun, and positive. Go to the website to learn more about that and to sign up if you like. I want to say that everything I share in this show is educational in nature and it’s not medical or psychiatric advice. If you’re having any serious psychological symptoms, please seek professional help. If you like what you’re learning here, thank you for subscribing and leaving me a review. Let’s jump right in. Many of you that are reading have committed to a journey of growth in your search for love. This is such a big thing because we’re taught that somehow, we should have this ‘it’, which means attractiveness, success in dating, and success in finding love. I guess some of us do have that, but the rest of us have to do some real work to rewire, shift, and grow. Take a wisdom path to learn about how we push love away and how we can invite love in. Those learnings are some of the most beautiful and strengthening learnings that we can have in our life. I consider this holy and sacred ground. I consider it some of the most precious and important learning that can exist.

Growing As A Person

Many of you have chosen your own path where you are exploring, “What does it mean to grow as a person who knows how to love? What does it mean to grow as a person who’s looking for love and who this time is really looking for healthy, real, sustainable, and beautiful love? What does it mean to be someone who sees our clay feet in love and is humbled by that realization of the ways that we miss signals, push people away, go numb, do unkind things?” Those of us who are humbled by those things and say, “I want to change them,” that’s why we’re here. When we start learning new skills and new insights, I hope that for you, this show is filled with insights that feel like wisdom, possibility, and an invitation to you tackling the climb of your own intimacy journey. Having that experience is a wonderful thing. It’s exciting. It gives a feeling of hope and it moves us away from that relentless and ugly current that tells us that we’re not acting masculine enough or feminine enough or we’re not flirting right. The issues are our hair, weight, glutes, and that we don’t act cool enough. We don’t have these pickup skills. All this crap that steers us away from love and towards self-loathing in an indirect and strange circular path. A little bit more about that – When we decide to take that path of fixing ourselves and fixing our packaging, when that becomes, “I’m all for looking good. I’m all for feeling confident in expressing that. I’m all for the joy of fun flirting,” I’m all for all of those things. Here's how to know if you're progressing in your search for love.CLICK TO TWEETWhat I’m not for is putting the packaging improvement first because that’s a soul killer that weakens us. It does something else too, a strange thing. When we take that path, “How can I fix myself? How can I make myself more attractive? How am I not attractive enough? That must be why I’m not in a relationship.” God knows I spent decades seduced by that. When we do that, we end up being sexually and romantically attracted to people who are not going to be available. This is a mystical thing to me. It’s something I talk about a lot. In my work with clients and in my intensives, I see that as people learn to value and treasure their core gifts, their attractions begin to change. I’ve seen this in my own life too. When we start by honoring who we are and learning to honor who the other person is and when we honor our sense of discrimination, those are the things that matter and work. Those are the things wherein our search for love become our discovery of self-love and they join together. In that happening, that’s when we learn the real skills of intimacy which are not, “How can I change myself and airbrush myself so that I’m more attractive? Who am I? Who is the other person? How can I be real? How can I treasure them? How can I treasure me? How can we honor each other? How can I say what’s real for me?” When we do that, when we do those things, our search for love unequivocally, absolutely, fundamentally changes. That’s a hard work miracle, but it happens.

Looking For Love

These are the great things that happen when we take on a conscious path to looking for love. It sounds simple from here. It’s like a high aerial view. I’ve talked about this. It’s like looking at a map and 1 inch equals 300 miles so, “I go from here to there. It’s easy.” The map is right. That’s true, it tells you where to go. When you’re there on ground and following that, you realize that a road is closed because of a detour. Another road is closed because of a flood. Another road you don’t want to go down because it’s really, really unpleasant. There’s a much more interesting road somewhere else. The real path and these concepts that I’m saying are absolutely true. On the ground, it’s still hard, murky, confusing.

  That period where we’re looking for love and we’re learning to live these changes, there’s still this period where it’s like, “What’s going on? When is it going to happen? When am I going to see the difference? When am I going to meet someone who’s not almost?” In this journey, I think what many people experience as they learn these lessons that we talk about here is the kind of people they meet change, but it’s a stepping stone thing. Often the people you meet as you begin this journey or you dive into the earlier stages of this journey  are better than the people you were meeting. You’re attracted and interested. You say, “This feels different. I get it.” You sometimes end up saying, “It’s not close enough.” They still have many of those old traits and they’re not working on them. They’re not addressing them. That’s because it’s a stepping stone process. This middle process is hard. When you enter into a tunnel and you’ve got the light from behind you, when you’re coming out of a tunnel, you see the light at the end of the tunnel. In the middle of the tunnel, how do you find the light and hope when you feel it’s a slogging journey? When it’s just so damn exhausting to try again or deflating to meet another “almost” person? How do you get through that? I’m going to talk about a few different ways. The first way that I want to talk about is this. A client once said to me, “I realize that no matter where I am and no matter what challenges I’m going through, the first question is always going to be the same. The acknowledgment and gratitude for what you have already and of how far you’ve come. The act of looking back from where you’ve been, seeing where you are, and seeing the arc of progress.” Incomplete still, but looking back and saying, “That’s where I came from.”

Questions To Help You Think Why You’re Stuck

Acknowledging the growth is a huge and important tool. We’re going to do that together because I’m going to ask you five questions. As you answer them, you will notice the ways in which maybe you might be still stuck in your journey or you’ll be able to acknowledge ways that you are progressing in your journey. If you’re feeling that you’re not progressing and you’re stuck. I’m going to give you a few questions to help you think about why you might be stuck. You might need to have some kind of intervention, tinkering, and shift. With that, you’re free again to continue moving forward. I want you to think about each one and you can answer it out loud or write it down if you want. Great things happen when we take on a conscious path to looking for love.CLICK TO TWEETLet’s start with these fabulous questions. The first question is in your journey, are you coming to understand and value your authentic self, gifts, passions, and your sensitivities more deeply? Are you, and think about that? Do you feel you understand and value your innate gifts, deep sensitivities, and passions more fully as opposed to thinking, “This is going to be too much. I’m going to get in trouble for this?” No one says you’re going to be romantically attracted to this. It’s too different and weird. Are you coming to treasure those parts and say, “This is who I am?” Take a minute and think about that. If your answer is yes, then that is truly something to cheer. It is something that will unequivocally shift the creation of the fabric of your future. It will shift the patterns of your future in good and important ways. I talk about two different kinds of the circuitry of attraction: attractions of deprivation and attractions of inspiration. That was the piece of my Deeper Dating book that Oprah.com excerpted. The ability to tell the difference and attractions of deprivation are attractions where the attraction is at least in part trying to get the other person to finally be available, do their part of the work, and treat you kindly with dignity and respect. There’s this passion for that because they’re almost there, but they’re not there. We can get lost in that forever. Those are attractions of deprivation. Attractions of inspiration are when we become sexually and romantically attracted to somebody because of his or her goodness, solidity, integrity, capacity, decency, availability, generosity of spirit and wonderful things. When we become sexually and romantically attracted to someone because of their goodness and their solidity and that’s woven in, we’re making the right choices. We are finally making the choices that are going to lead to a love-filled future. It’s a big choice point. That’s another question. Are you losing your taste for your attractions of deprivation and getting away from them more quickly? If so, that is something else to celebrate.

  The third question is, are you increasingly following your attractions of inspiration? Are you noticing people like that more? Are you more interested in them? Are you spending more time with them? I know for me, attractions of inspiration used to seem boring. I love that spicy edge of an unavailable person. As I grew, I came to realize there’s a wonderful ancient Hindu saying that goes, “What we used to think was honey and then we realize it is poison. What we used to think is poison turns out to be honey.” I thought attractions of inspiration were the most boring thing that existed. I hated that I thought that because I knew that was going to get me in trouble, but I still thought it and I felt it. As I began to love attractions of inspiration more, my world changed truly. The fourth question, are you being yourself more in your relationships? There’s this wonderful saying, “Say what you mean, mean what you say, but don’t say it mean.” That’s from the world of twelve-step wisdom. Are you expressing your authentic self more fully in your relationships? If your answer to that is yes, this is also wonderful. If you are doing those things, you are moving closer toward the healthy love you dream of. These things are light in the middle of the tunnel. The fifth question is, are you adding to this recipe of growth a nice dollop of bravery, getting out there, virtually or in person? These days, it’s more virtually to meet new people. I always say this, virtual venues or in-person venues with people who share your passions, interests, and values are probably the best place to meet.

Questions That Will Help Explain Your Stuck Point

If you’re online, you can filter people’s profiles by those things. Every question you answered yes to is a cause for celebration. If you answered yes to at least two of those questions, the chances are good that your dating life is changing in significant ways. If you’re saying yes to more of those, maybe 3 or 4, it is possible that almost mysteriously you are meeting kinder and more available people and you’re more interested in them. Trust the path you’re working because it’s working. If you honestly feel that there are no significant changes occurring for you as a result of this inner work that you’re doing, there are a few questions I’d like you to ask. Usually, at least one of them is going to hold the key to explaining your stuck point. Willpower, in cases where we're trying to change personality patterns, is one of the weakest tools in toolbox; support is the most powerful.CLICK TO TWEETIf you’re online, you can filter people’s profiles by those things. Every question you answered yes to is cause for celebration. If you answered yes to at least two of those questions, the chances are good that your dating life is changing in significant ways. If you’re saying yes to more of those, maybe 3 or 4, it is possible that almost mysteriously you are meeting kinder and more available people and you’re more interested in them. Trust the path you’re working because it’s working. If you honestly feel that there are no significant changes occurring for you as a result of this inner work that you’re doing, there are a few questions I’d like you to ask. Usually, at least one of them is going to hold the key to explaining your stuck point. Willpower, in cases where we're trying to change personality patterns, is one of the weakest tools in toolbox; support is the most powerful.CLICK TO TWEETNumber one, are you in an actively abusive relationship of any sort? If you are, not only will you be being abused and hurt, which is profoundly depleting, diminishing, wounding, and traumatizing. There’s a secondary problem too. It’s a huge cost that come with these relationships. That is the deep-down belief that you somehow don’t deserve better gets reinforced every day you’re in this relationship. It gets reinforced every time you feel diminished by this person. In an abusive relationship, if it’s physically abusive and seriously emotionally abusive, get help to help get out. Don’t just get out because sometimes that could be dangerous unless you absolutely need to for health and safety reasons, then just get out. If you can get help in doing it, you will protect yourself in the process. I know somebody who has been in a relationship for a gazillion years. Her wife can be sharp-tongued and she hates it. My friend hates that. They have a deal and they’ve done this for many years. Every time the wife is sharp-tongued, she has to give my friend $0.25. No serious amount of money, but they love each other. As sharp tongued as her wife is, she’s a wonderful person and loves her. This works for them. I love that story. If you’re in a relationship where the abuse is not extreme, then that’s what needs to be worked on. It’s not okay for you to end up feeling diminished. Next question, do you have any untreated psychiatric disorders or any active addictions? When I say untreated psychiatric disorders, I don’t mean mild depression or anxiety, I mean, depression, anxiety, or other psychiatric conditions that destabilize you in regular ways from which you are either untreated or undertreated. You have not found a treatment that stabilizes you or you have an active addiction. If those things are true, none of this stuff is going to work or stick except to help get you into treatment at best. A relationship won’t be able to work until you address this. Stop and do that, make that commitment because nothing’s going to work until you do. There will be so much pain in not doing it and such a sense of mastery in tackling and addressing these things. Another one is are you doing this work alone without a learning partner or support? If so, it’s much harder. I would encourage all of you to find a learning partner. Somebody who will work with you and be with you as you learn your lessons of intimacy day by day and date by date. Who can listen, support you, and guide you in a way that’s not critical, but as warm and caring. I can’t tell you how important it is but the research backs it up 100%. I did a whole episode on this subject. Another one is are you resisting putting your heart into this work? That’s something to think about. In other words, doing it with gusto and diving into your intimacy lessons. I want to say it’s not easy. It’s humbling to say, “I see that I’m pushing love away. I am seeing my clay feet in this relationship or in the ways that I date.” This is one of the greatest things that we can give ourselves is that humbling acknowledgment. When that happens, we change. When that doesn’t happen, we feel ashamed and resistant to change. The last one I want to say, is there another issue, an old relationship you haven’t been able to let go of that’s blocking your progress? If any of these things are going on, I want to encourage you to take the brave step of getting support. If you’re stuck here, don’t try to fix it alone because your efforts will be much more weakened. Willpower, in cases where we’re trying to change personality patterns, it’s one of the weakest tools in the toolbox. Support is the most powerful. That’s a thought I want to share with you. In closing that in this phase, you might feel you’re stuck at some of the old familiar, creepy, sad, and frustrating crossroads that you’ve been at before in your dating life. Sometimes it might even feel like nothing’s different, but things are different. If you look more closely, you’ll see that you are coming to those old crossroads with a new set of tools. With a stronger sense of connection to your own gifts and hopefully with more support. At every crossroad, especially with support, you’ll notice that you’re making new micro shifts in your approach that have a little bit more self-love, self-dignifying, more passion, power, self-honoring, and kindness. You’ll notice these micro shifts and those micro shifts open new doors. When new doors open, that means that a new future is being formed, shaped, and sculpted. You’ll sense that something new is happening because you’ll feel glimmers of intimacy at points that once just felt like closed doors. Think about, which of these ideas hits you the most? The most useful is the most feeling like a guidepost for you. I encourage you to hold that to your heart, do something constructive and creative with it. Thank you for reading. I hope this was useful. I look forward to seeing you on the next episode of the Deeper Dating PODCAST.

Table of Contents

• • The Path Is Never Simple
  • A Revelation
  • Becoming A Dad
  • What Is Love Asking Of Me?

Watch the episode here:

The Simple Question That Will Lead You To Love

And The Story Of How I Became A Dad And Found Love

In this episode, I’m going to share a personal story about my own journey to find love and become a dad. I’m going to share a simple process that is life-changing in its beauty to help you deepen into your own intimacy journey. So stay tuned to the Deeper Dating Podcast. Hello everybody, and welcome to the Deeper Dating Podcast. I’m Ken Page – I’m a psychotherapist and a coach, the founder of the new way to meet online – called “Deeper Dating”, and the author of the book “Deeper Dating”. — Today, we’re going to talk about one question that you can ask yourself that will change the course of your entire intimacy journey. I’m going to tell a story about how that has been true for me. This week, and every week, I’m going to share with you the greatest skills that I know to help you find love, keep it flourishing, and heal your life in the process because the skills of dating are nothing more than the skills of intimacy. And if you’d like a transcript of this episode  you can just go to DeeperDatingpodcast.com, and if you go there you’ll also get a number of free gifts from me if you decide to join my mailing list. I also just want to say that everything I’m going to share in this  podcast is educational in nature. It’s not medical, psychiatric advice or treatment. Finally, if you like what you’re learning here, it would be a wonderful gift if you could subscribe on iTunes or elsewhere and leave me a review. Thank you so much for that and let’s dive in.

The Path Is Never Simple

The path to love is really almost never simple. When we decide to pursue our longing for love, we’re led to challenges and possibilities that we might never have dreamed of. For me, the decision to become a father as a 40-something, single, gay man in New York City is what changed everything for me. In this post, I’m going to tell that story. I’m also going to offer a really potent exercise for following your own call to love wherever it is that that leads you. I saw this beautiful movie called “Infinitely Polar Bear” with Mark Ruffalo and Imogene Wolodarsky, who was incredibly brilliant. In this movie, Mark Ruffalo’s character suffered from very severe manic depression, but he was still able to build a life. It careened wildly but it somehow worked because he loved his children. It made me think about parenthood and how any deep love can turn us inside out. It asks us to change in ways that we might never otherwise have been pushed and forced to change and face ourselves, and forces our world to open up in ways that we never would have thought of or chosen on our own. That made me think a little bit about my story, which I’m going to tell you a little bit about. I grew up and came of age as a gay man in the 80’s in New York City. I grew up gay in the ‘60’s and the ‘70’s. When I moved to New York, it was this giant theme park of recreational sex, dating conquests, and wild and insane dance marathons. I was on a desperate hunt for love. Usually, that hunt was a complete failure to me. I failed again and again. I never stopped trying and I never stopped hoping. I didn’t try in the wisest ways, but damn I tried. The path to love is never simple. It’s fraught with challenges and possibilities that we never dreamed of.CLICK TO TWEET

A Revelation

In my early 30s, I hit bottom and I found myself doubled over with this terrible sense of emptiness. It had been growing inside me for all those years that I was pursuing my career, pursuing loves, and having tons of recreational sex. Searching for love in a way that was that was laid out for me by gay male culture in New York City, but completely wasn’t working for me. I realized at a certain point that I had spent all this time looking for love, but I was ignoring the process of building love in my life. That was a revelation and there were so many pieces to that revelation.  So many, kinds of moments of painful awareness, many moments of, “I’m going to become someone who loves. I’m going to be someone who can have a pet.” That was big for me. That was a complete revelation that I could be someone who could take care of a pet. That was a big step for me. I didn’t know what to do with this revelation when it came to my life. At this point, I had worked through a number of emotional issues. God knows there’s always more, but at that point I had worked through really big stuff. I built this cardboard box and I kept it in my room. It had a slot in it. I wrote something on the top, I wrote, “I can do whatever the fuck I want.” That was what the box said. Anytime I had a new idea about what might be exciting or important or next for me, I’d write on a piece of paper and I’d put it in the box. Finally, I stopped doing that because I had a million ideas but none of them called to me in that intense way that I was looking for. Then in 1999, I saw another movie. I saw Almodóvar’s movie, “All About My Mother”. In this movie, the protagonist had something very painful happen to her. It was only through caring for other people that she found a through line out of her suffering. I saw this movie with a friend of mine. It touched me in this really deep way. I felt shaken somewhere deep inside in a way that I didn’t have words. I said to my friend, “I need a minute.” I went out and I found some quiet space. I was asking myself, “What is this, what is this feeling?” All these jumbled emotions resolved into an answer, I wanted to become a dad. Even though I was single, gay and 44, and nowhere near rich, all of a sudden I knew what I wanted to do. I was filled with excitement and terror and a sense of adventure.

Becoming A Dad

For the next year, I thought this through. I careened between, “I am going to do this,” to the other side which was, “Am I out of my goddamn mind?” I had a hard time making a decision because I didn’t want to make a stupid decision. I wanted to make a wise decision. I didn’t want to do it based on fear but I didn’t want to do it without an awareness of what this would do to my life. I went through this. I tortured my friends and my parents. They were wonderful, glorious and supportive. They let me struggle with this. My dad who I’ve spoken about in another episode called Losing Love and Finding It Again. He was a Holocaust survivor. He was completely silent through this whole thing. He did not want to influence my decision. At one point, after about a year, he broke his silence that he had managed to keep. He asked me, “Ken, do you really want a child?” I thought about that question like I had thought about it a million times before and my answer was still the same. I said, “Yes.” My dad’s response was stark and simple. He said, “Then you have to jump.” We were on top of the Queensboro Bridge at that time. The city lights were like jewels and the height was dizzying. His words were what I needed to hear. After that internal answer, I began the process that led me to my son. Nine months later, the day that I left for Cambodia, I had my last visit with my grandmother. She died while I was returning home with my son, and my sister who came with me. Her very last words to me were, “Children bring joy.” She had a picture of my son that I had gotten from the orphanage. She would kiss it and say that. She was about 100 at that time. She was right. My life has definitely been complicated and challenging in ways that I couldn’t have dreamt of in being a dad. There is one part of my heart that has felt full in a different way and that has never changed. Not that it hasn’t been complicated with having a son who’s a teenager, but still and all that has been true. With all of the challenges, I’m still floored by the privilege of being someone’s dad. So this  huge detour from my dating life, because this is what I was focused on during this time, which was listening to the call of love for me, leading me to some place I hadn’t dreamt of. This giant detour from my dating life is what led me to my husband. I’ve talked about this before, but the story is that Provincetown Family Week is an annual event for LGBTQ families. I had never gone because I just felt like it was going to be too depressing to be surrounded by all these happy coupled parents.

  Two of my closest friends actually were aggressive with me and they cornered me. One literally cornered me and pressed me up against a screen door. She said, “You are going.” She had never done anything like that to me before and I thought, “This gal means it.” Someone else did the same thing a little less aggressively but very clearly, “You’ve got to go, Ken.” I decided I was going to go. I felt I had no choice in the matter. It was not what I was feeling like love was calling me to do. It was what people who loved me and knew me were calling me to do. That was close enough. In the face of their passion, I listened. It was there that I met my husband, Greg, who was the father of two children. We have been a blended family since that day, I guess it’s going to be 12 years ago, very shortly. Sometimes love calls us into worlds that we never thought we have to enter. When it calls us, our challenge and our adventure is to say, “Yes.” This might be something you want to think about, even right now. How’s love calling you? My friend, Conner Middelmann-Whitney, who’s the author of  Zest For Life: The Mediterranean Anti-Cancer Diet, a wonderful book. She told me a beautiful story. At her wedding, it was a Quaker wedding, this elderly woman stood up and she shared this simple question that she said is what guided her. It was like the lighthouse for her through a long and good marriage. She said that at any point in her relationship with her husband, at any point of bewilderment, crossroads, difficult choice or challenge in her relationship with her husband, she would ask herself this, it’s such a beautiful question, “What is love asking of me?” That question was a wedding gift for Conner and her new husband. This is a wonderful question.

What Is Love Asking Of Me?

I encourage you as we move toward the closing of this episode to try this exercise right now. Don’t wait for the right moment, do it right now. Take a minute and ask yourself, “What is love asking of me right now in my life?” It might be a quick and easy thing. It might be a huge epic thing. It might be a little internal shift. It might be an action that’s hard or scary. Whatever it is, this is our mastery path, is asking ourself that question and then inching up to a yes and living that. That is how we become strong, resilient and loving human beings. That’s how we learn to love and respect ourselves. When we do this, worlds open up for us, just like worlds opened up for me. If you even want to take a minute to think about this, feel free to do that. Whatever you came up with, that’s your guiding insight. Asking that question is a way of righting ourselves and  guiding ourselves in the world. It becomes our fabulous next. When it does and we say yes to it, we become people who love better. This is a path to joy. Our answer is going to define the next intimacy adventure in our life. Saying yes will lead us to a future that might be less safe but will be more filled with the love that we desire, and will help us move into a place where more and more we feel comfortable and empowered in our bodies and our hearts. This is a fabulous and simple micro-meditation. A question that you can take with you and live to become more the person that you dream of being and desire to be. Thanks so much for listening. Please feel free to visit DeeperDatingPodcast.com or our new website, DeeperDating.com. I look forward to seeing you on the next episode.

You can discover your own unique intimacy genius, and this episode will teach you how. In the following audio and blog post, you’ll learn tools to discover your deepest Core Gifts, and you’ll learn how to use those gifts to create powerful and positive changes in your dating life, your relationships, and your capacity to love and accept yourself more deeply.

Table of Contents

• • Heart And Soul
  • Discovering Your Intimacy-Genius
  • The Challenge Of Authenticity
  • Finding Your Most Beautiful Self

Watch the episode here:

How To Discover Your Unique Intimacy-Genius

Everybody has their own qualities of intimacy genius. They’re unique to each of us. Stay tuned to this episode to learn how to discover your unique intimacy genius, and to use these gifts to help you build and create more love in your life. — Today, I’m going to share with you how you can discover your own intimacy genius. This week and every week, I’ll share the greatest tools I know to help you find love and keep it flourishing and heal your life in the process because the skills of dating are nothing more than the skills of love. Those are the greatest skills of all for a happy rich life. If you want to learn more about deeper dating, just go to DeeperDatingPodcast.com. If you sign up for my mailing list, you’ll get free gifts and learn how to use these ideas to transform your own intimacy journey. We’ve just created a new online platform for single people to meet. You could just go to DeeperDating.com to learn more about that. And when you go to DeeperDatingPodcast.com  you will get transcripts of every single episode including this one. I also just want to say that everything I share is educational in nature. It’s not medical or psychiatric advice or treatment. If you’re experiencing any serious symptoms, please do seek professional help. Finally, if you like what you’re learning here, I would love it if you could subscribe and leave me a review. Thanks to everyone who’s done that already.

Heart And Soul

Let’s jump in. I would say the heart and the soul of the biggest thing that I have learned in my entire intimacy journey and in my work with people who are seeking deeper intimacy in their lives is that the parts of ourselves that we’re the most embarrassed by, ashamed of, don’t know what to do with, are the places of our genius. These are the places, parts of ourselves that I call core gifts. They are where our deepest capacity for brilliance in intimacy lies but they’re challenging because they’re qualities of genius. The skills of dating are nothing more than the skills of love.CLICK TO TWEETThey’re qualities where we feel things extra deeply, where we notice things extra closely, where we think in ways that are different and unique. These are the parts of us where we feel the most deeply. In this world, we are often shamed for those parts of ourselves because they’re places of our intimacy genius. In this episode, I’m going to teach you how to name and discover yours and how to learn how to honor them more deeply. The changes that create are gorgeous. That’s about all I can say there. I’ll say a lot more about that. We’re given this cookie-cutter sense of what intimacy is. You have to look a certain way to be attractive to people. You have to act a certain way to be attractive to people. You have to be this way with your masculinity, this way with your femininity, this way with your flirtation skills and all of this crap that could be interesting and could be useful in some ways, but is toxic when it steers us away from our authenticity, the real self that we are. If we try to be these other things that we’re not, this is what’s going to happen. People who see our weakness are going to prey on us, or we’ll just find the wrong people. Later, we have to come out as who we are to them, which can be a very complicated thing. What I would propose is that from your childhood, you have had qualities that have made you feel different, ways in which you felt too sensitive or too intense, too demanding or too different. Those places are the places where our beauty and genius lies. It’s an amazing process that we need to go to the parts of ourselves that when we were teenagers or when we were older, we learned were shameful, embarrassing, awkward and different. We need to go back and reclaim those parts and discover the beauty and the brilliance in them. If you think for a moment about the ways that you have felt different from others, the places in which you had heightened sensibilities, take a minute to think about that. Maybe you felt the pain of disconnection more and you longed for intimacy more. Maybe untruth bothered you more than it bothered other people. Maybe there was a deep kind of tenderness of spirit that felt too soft for the world, or maybe there was ferocity and intensity that felt too big for the world. Take a minute to think about this and think then about the messages that you got that those parts of you were problems. The truth is those parts of us are problems because they’re demanding. They’re intense. They’re fierce. They feel pain and they feel joy in these highly charged parts of ourselves in ways that we might not feel it in other ways. They’re the most intense parts of our being and hence, we’ve often felt like they’re just awkward, but the key to this entire intimacy journey is that they are sacred. They are precious. They are the center of your being. The more we learn to honor those parts of ourselves, the more our entire world changes and the more our search for love changes.

Discovering Your Intimacy-Genius

What are these qualities that I call your intimacy genius, or also in my books and my courses, I call your core gifts? Some core gift qualities are the ones that I’ve already said – a deep sensitivity, maybe a longing for sensual connection that goes deep, maybe a sense that through our sensuality or through our spirituality or our honesty, we can make a big difference in the world. Probably growing up, some of these qualities were problematic to our peers, problematic to our parents or problematic to everybody. The hero’s journey is going back and reclaiming those parts of ourselves. I’m going to speak a little bit about how to do that. The questions that will help you identify your intimacy genius are two big important questions. I’ve talked about them before. They’re a big deal. One question is in your day-to-day life, as you walk through your life, “what things hurt your heart? What things make you feel horrible, in pain, broken, wounded or wake you up in the middle of the night? What are the things that pull at your heart? What are the things that hurt your heart that keep you worried, that keep you concerned?”

  If you go through your days and you notice consciously the things that hurt your heart, if you’re like most of us, the first thing you’ll notice is that inner voice that says you are too damn sensitive. When we can push that voice aside and become curious and say, “Maybe I’m too sensitive, but I’m interested in seeing what this was that hurt me so much.” We realize that maybe it was an interaction with someone we love, which was not kind, where truth wasn’t being told or was a part of you that was not being recognized or that you weren’t recognizing a part of the other person. These things might hurt your heart. Many people have the experience of their heart being hurt when connection is broken. They say that intimacy is a process of rupture and repair. For many of us, when the connection doesn’t feel right, when it feels broken, that causes a great deal of pain. This is something that I am hypersensitive to. For example, I can be talking to my husband. I can mention something that hurt or bothered me that happened in the family or in an interaction that worried me or concerns me or didn’t feel right. He might not have noticed it with the kind of intensity that I did. He would notice other things that I wouldn’t notice, but those are my gifts. I feel connection. I feel a break in connection. Good connection brings me intense joy, breaks in connection trouble me deeply. These are qualities that I did not know how to manage growing up. I thought of them as sicknesses. I thought of them as weaknesses. I thought of them as things that did not make me sexy or attractive, but the truth is that they are who I am. As I learned to honor those parts of me, which is the honoring of those parts of ourselves, the de-orphaning of those parts of ourselves, the reclaiming of those parts of ourselves and naming them as valid as not too sensitive, but precious, real and authentic, that is a process of true empowerment. When we do that, truly our attractions change, our search for love changes, our relationships change and our understanding of ourselves changes. The other question is, “what inspires me, what things in my day-to-day life fill my heart?” It may be that moment that you’re reading the paper and it feels like a break. The sense of peace and expansion of not having to do anything (hand raised) fill your heart. It may be a sexual connection that feels tender, beautiful and full of love. It may be an interaction with someone you love that feels exquisite. It may be somebody doing something brave or bold or kind. This is a study of ourselves that is one of the greatest studies that we can do, which is to notice what fills our heart, what inspires our heart. These are two questions that are the keys to the deepest user’s manual of our lives. I encourage everyone to think about this and ask yourself on a moment to moment like, “Ouch, I feel pain.” What is this? What was that pain? How might that have been a gift place in me where there’s a deep sensitivity, a deep kind of compassion, a deep awareness? It hurts, but it’s a gift. We experience quiet joys, or bursting joys, or soft joys, or senses of gratification in our day-to-day life that we normally would appreciate and move past. We realize that they are more than pleasures. They’re portals to our deepest self. They are portals to places where we can expand into joy in very special and important ways. They’re portals too because as you notice the things in your interactions with people that fill your heart, move you, make you feel peaceful, expansive, inspired or excited, you will find patterns. Again and again, you’ll see certain kinds of things that create that feeling for you. When you know that you have discovered the fuel for your genius because our different geniuses run on different fuels. Our great fuel is the things that inspire us. I would also say our great fuel is the things that hurt us, especially when we dignify their joys, but also the things that hurt us by recognizing this is touching me in a place that is deep. This must matter. What’s the gift here? What’s the sensitivity? How is that a gift?

The Challenge Of Authenticity

We go around minimizing our joys and not realizing that they are deep portals and telling ourselves we’re too sensitive instead of understanding that these are the places that we care the most deeply, which are the most human and beautiful parts of ourselves. When we honor those parts of ourselves, the potential for joy, the potential for authentic closeness increases dramatically. I also want to say though that this is not all sweetness in life. There are pain and the things that hurt us. There’s a challenge in the things that give us joy very often. There are mountains that have to be climbed to achieve that joy. There are deep places we have to go to and touch to learn how to bear, and live with, the sadness or intervene in different ways to create healing where there was once sadness. These are big things. These are hero’s journey things. Recognizing it is not like pink paint. It is a challenge, but it’s the challenge of authenticity. The more we do it, the more we experience self-love and the more we experience people who are our happiness, people gravitating toward us. I know this to be true. I’ve seen it in my own life. I’ve seen it with so many clients that I’ve worked with and I believe that it’s true. To add a little bit to the complexity here, you’ve got a kid who is a genius. That’s going to be a kid who’s going to need a lot of special care, special guidance, special help with interesting challenges that they experience. You’ve got intimacy genius qualities and you do. All of us do. They need special care. They need special guidance. They’re not going to be easy. They’re not going to get right out of the box instructions that are going to be workable. It’s a journey to learn to listen to these qualities and what they want because they’re going to ask for things that challenge us and challenge the people around us. That is the truth. It’s a great truth. It’s wonderful. Who would not want to cultivate their genius? There are challenges in the things that give us joy.CLICK TO TWEETSome of the things that happen, these are the parts of ourselves, obviously, where the charge is greatest. These are parts of us that exist in our psyche, which are most highly charged because you’ve experienced most joy and pain there. They’re the most highly charged places. You want joy. You fear the pain and these things, whatever they are, their meaning dense, like nutrient-dense, these parts of us. They have huge amounts of meaning. What does that mean? Without guidance and in the process of growing up, we’ve probably done a lot of stupid things around these gifts. We’ve suppressed them. We’ve acted them out in unhelpful ways. Usually, we have a lot of car crashes around our core gifts, our intimacy genius, where we did not have the tools. The pain was so great that all we could do was act out. When a child is impossible, when a child acts out, it’s because there’s a pain inside of them so great that they don’t have the user’s manual yet. That’s the best that they can do. That happens for us as well. There’s a journey, and it’s a fascinating journey, of discovering our user’s manual. What’s the fuel for my genius? Who are the people with whom I feel at home showing these qualities, hence safe, hence happiest? How do I show these qualities in an intimate relationship? What are the problems that come up when I feel and show them? What are the wonderful glorious things that happen when I feel them and show them and share them and give from those places? These are all parts of our user manual? What’s the pacing that I need? Elaine Aron speaks about the highly sensitive people beautifully. She talks about understanding, for example, highly sensitive people might need to pull away from intimacy. I know I’m a highly sensitive person. I’m an “HSP”, as Dr. Aron calls it. I know that I need to pull away from intimacy so that I can breathe. When I come back, I come back richer and more connected, but I need to pull away. It’s like a rocking motion back and then forth. God knows I did not know this for decades. Every time I felt the need to pull away, I shamed myself for it. I experienced it as a fear of intimacy. I can’t do this love thing because I feel myself pulling away. I learned to discover that pulling away and giving myself space and grace did not mean that I would keep continually pulling away. It meant that I would come back with more of a full sense of self. I need to do that more than a lot of people. This is not a cookie-cutter behavioral pattern, but it’s my pattern. Part of my intimacy genius is how deeply I care about relationships, which causes a lot of issues and a lot of beauty.

 

Finding Your Most Beautiful Self

I want to offer everybody an exercise as we move toward the closing of this episode. That is to take a couple of days and the journal and note the things that hurt your heart. I’m talking about the big hurt. Yes, but I’m also talking about micro hurts, micro tears, micro sadness. It’s to notice the things that cause them and to think, what’s the part of me being hurt? What is the part of me that is carrying so much? Which is another way of saying the same thing. What is it in me that’s being hurt? What made it care? Is it carrying so much? How is that a part of who I am? To notice these things and you will find that in these places where you care enough, that you get hurt, that’s your angel self. That’s your most beautiful self. That’s the Holy self. That’s the self that can have wings. That’s the self that has compassion, but it needs to be held with honor. These are tools that were not taught, but they’re the deeper, richer tools of authenticity. Another question is again, to notice the ways in which your heart is filled, and you write these things down. You take notes. Moments that you feel inspired, that you feel touched, that you feel a melty feeling that you feel maybe like a prick of tears in your eyes, that you feel your heart swell, that you feel a sense of peace, intensified meaning and spaciousness. All of those wonderful feelings, note them. If you can, and this is a fun thing to do, hold them a little bit longer and let them ripple through your being, knowing that they are portals that are meant to be. Also think, “What is this that brought me so much joy? What is it that inspired me like that?” I’m going to put words on it. There was an act of kindness that was being done that made me feel so good or someone listened to me about something very tender. What is this listening thing? Is that something that matters to me? Is that something I’ve been in pain about because people can’t do that? Is that something I try to give to other people because I know how much it hurts not to be listened to? You will begin to notice the things that bring that joy for you. It might be creativity. It might be a sensual expression. It can be so many different things, but notice those things and then think, “what’s the quality in me here that is captured by this joy? What’s the quality in me here that is being fueled by this experience that is bringing me joy?” As we do this, we come to know who we are and these are rich, complicated, beautiful lessons. When we can share this stuff with the people who love us. Our relationships deepen in incredible ways if there are people who are willing and capable of doing that richer and deeper form of connection. Where it feels like they’re holding our unique being with cupped, spacious, kind and seeing hands. Those people are our gold. Thank you so much for tuning into this episode. I’m excited to get your feedback and what happens when you do this exercise, what you notice, what you discover, what it reminds you of, what it brings back for you. To share that, you can go to DeeperDatingPodcast.com and you can go click on Ask Ken, and you can leave me a message that describes that. Some of your messages I’m going to be sharing so you can also tell me, “Can I use the recording?” or do you prefer that I don’t? Should I use your name? Should I not use your name? All of those are fine and I always honor that. Thank you so much for reading. I’ll see you in the next episode

Listeners bring their most important questions about love, sex, dating and relationships to Ken – and get his personal direct advice in Ken’s Q and A podcasts. Once a month, Ken answers your personal questions about love, dating, sex and more. Today’s powerful questions include: The person I’m seeing is wonderful – but I keep wanting more! My relationship might be ending, but I want to keep it alive. I’m with someone great, but I wish I was more physically attracted.

Table of Contents

• A Yearning for Frequent and Constant Connection
• Questions About Love and the Need for Deeper Connection
• A Fabulous Combination of Skills
• Your Questions About Love Require Dropping Down Into Your Body
• Finding an Intimacy Treasure

Episode Introduction: Questions About Love

Can friends with benefits be a good thing? I’m with someone great, but I want more from him. I found someone wonderful, but I don’t know if I’m attracted enough to make it work. These are just some of the questions that I’ll be answering in this episode of the Deeper Dating Podcast. All these questions came from you, my audience, so stay tuned to learn more. Hello, everybody, and welcome to the Deeper Dating Podcast. I’m Ken Page, and I’m the author of the book Deeper Dating and the host of this show. Today, I’m going to be doing a Q&A session with a lot of your important pressing questions about sex, love, and intimacy. This week and every week, I’m going to share the greatest and most important tools that I know to help you find healthy love and keep it flourishing and heal your life in the process. Because the skills of dating are nothing more than the skills of love. All of this episodes’ transcripts will be available on deeperdatingpodcast.com.

Subscribe and Leave Ken a Review

If you go there and you sign up for my mailing list, you’ll get free gifts and you’ll get to hear about a lot of really wonderful resources. Also, I just want to say that everything I share in this podcast is educational in nature. It’s not medical or psychiatric advice. If you feel you need help with any serious issues, please do seek professional help. By the way, if you like what you’re learning here, it would be a wonderful gift if you could subscribe and leave me a review. So thank you so much for that. Let’s jump in. So someone who I know has been following my work for a while called in and said, “I found a guy, and to anybody looking at our relationship from the outside, he’s treating me really, really well,” and then describes ways that she’s expressed what her needs are and that he’s able to honor those needs, listen, he’s deeply spiritually aware. He’s committed to love and kindness. He has a secure attachment style and it really feels like an attraction of inspiration, but she still constantly somehow feels deprived. She says, “I feel crazy. I constantly yearn for more connection with him. I want to ask him more questions. I want him to ask more questions about me. I want him to desire me more, to share that with me.” And she says, “I keep blaming myself because I have an anxious attachment style. I’ve shared that anxiety with him, and he doesn’t shame me for it or do anything to make me feel bad and he does try to adapt and communicate, but I just don’t feel like it’s enough.”

A Yearning for Frequent and Constant Connection

She says, “I’m so afraid that I feel like this with anybody, that maybe this is just a wound and a flaw of mine that I crave so much communication. But I also wonder, could this be a core gift that isn’t being seen and honored enough, a yearning for frequent and constant connection?” So she’s asking, “Is this a core gift or is this an attraction of deprivation? Should I just get out now? I truly love this person and I’m excited about him, and I think he has so many great qualities, but I feel so terrible so much of the time. Please send help.” So, first of all, I want to acknowledge this listener for writing so powerfully from the heart and being so honest about this and being able to hold it in this kind of very open and questioning way. What I would say first is that, yes, absolutely, unequivocally, this is a core gift. This profound need for communication and connection, which I know you return and give the same back, is nothing but a gift, but it’s extraordinary and it’s intense. Probably on the bell curve, you’re really far in that direction. But that’s the sign of a core gift. These are the places we feel so deeply that we wonder what’s wrong with us. I have to say that so many people who talk about having an anxious attachment style actually have an incredible sensitivity to the nuances of connection and disconnection and feel anxiety when there’s disconnection.

An Incredible Balance of Treasuring and Honoring the Flame

That is, in many ways, a gift. Often people with secure attachment styles miss a lot of that subtle stuff that those of us with anxious attachment styles really feel and notice; and yes, these are gifts. So, but that’s not a Hail Mary pass because our deepest immaturities, our biggest struggles, our most defensive behaviors, our most disempowering behaviors swirl around our core gifts. The places we care the most and the places we feel the most, that’s where our holiness lives and it’s where our problems come up so often. So much of our life task is to learn this incredible balance of treasuring and honoring the flame of these core gifts, but also learning behaviors where we don’t hurt others, where we don’t hurt ourselves, where we don’t burn bridges, where we don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater, and yet we stick with the fierce genius of our essential core gifts. Saying all of that, I just want to say to you, you found someone wonderful and that’s a big deal. That came from loads of deep inner work and that is something to be celebrated. To me, and I can’t speak as a seer or anything like that, I can just share my reflections. Those reflections are, “he sounds awesome, and what I would say is keep sharing your need.” Keep sharing your longing. I always quote Harville Hendrix who says,

“Turn your anger into an ask. Do not shame yourself because when we shame our self for our need, our need turns into neediness and passive aggressive behavior.”

The Language of Your Ongoing Connection Answers Your Questions About Love

Part of the language of your ongoing connection is that his normal is different than your normal in these ways. As someone who is very similar to you and whose husband doesn’t have the same need that I have for this deep, intimate, intense, connected conversation, I want to really encourage you to just keep sharing your needs and making space for him and where he’s at, too. If he’s the kind of guy he sounds like, he’s going to be able to listen. There are going to be times it’s hard for him. He’ll let you know when it’s hard for him. Little by little, he’ll express his needs, too. What I would say is this sounds great and don’t shame yourself. Don’t stop yourself. The more you can express your needs, your longing, your desire in a way that has the spaciousness that allows for him to share his own inner language, and that inner language might be that that’s not where he’s at, at this moment, to have that deep conversation. But you could feel his heart is so with you, that he wants to be there for you. This is an ongoing evolutionary process, what I would say. But what I would say most of all is hold this as a gift, honor it. Speak it in a way that gives him space so that you can develop humanity and gentleness knowing that you are honoring this quality in yourself. I would say that a lot of people listening to this podcast have similar attributes of wanting deep, deep connection.

Questions About Love and the Need for Deeper Connection

That’s why you’re here. That’s why you’re listening, and your needs might be greater than your partner’s. If your partner has a secure attachment style, they might be in a place where they’re just calm and content and fine, and you’re wanting more. There needs to be room for your wanting more. The more you do it in a non-blaming way, the more you do it in a loving and appreciative and asking way, the deeper the zone of intimacy you will probably go into with him. So give that a try, and if ultimately it doesn’t work, you’ll both keep talking about it and come to deeper, richer understandings.

What I encourage you not to do is to shame yourself, keep it to yourself and tell yourself that you should be different. Because in my experience that never works and it leads to a chasm of disconnection that tends to grow and grow over time.

I also hope that in your sex life, that’s a place, and in your touching life, and in your vacation life and times like that, those are times when you can really have that deep, deep, deep nourishing influx of intimacy that’s so precious and important to you. Next question is from a guy who’s in his forties. He says he’s out there actively dating women and he’s seeing a therapist, and the therapist feels that he needs to be learning about intimacy. He says he’s been listening to this podcast and totally loves it, so thank you so much for that. His question is that he’s just met a really awesome woman.

Questions About Love and Physical Attraction

The pros list is like 25 deep of all the woman’s wonderful attributes and only two negatives. One of them is he doesn’t know if he’s totally attracted to her and he’s kind of obsessing about this. His therapist says he needs to be learning about intimacy. He’s wondering, he says, “She’s probably, like in this scale of 0 to 10 of attraction, about a five or a six, and can that really grow?” He says he doesn’t want to be forcing something and he has to be honest. He’s beating himself up about this because he thinks, “This should really be easy, but I’m forcing it.” Meanwhile, his therapist is saying he should stick in there because he needs to be learning. He’s getting ahead of himself thinking, “Can I marry this woman?” So he’s asking for advice. Is this simple enough that he’s just not attracted enough to her? Or is it something he needs to learn to work through? I love this question, and I have a lot to say about it. The first thing I want to say is, eros cannot be forced. It’s got to come authentically, or you will just be causing yourself pain, and that’s not a good thing to do for either of you. So I really, really want to tell you if your attraction doesn’t grow and it stays at this level, and it’s just not enough, don’t beat yourself up for that because eros cannot be forced. The second thing is one of the greatest ways to dampen and weaken eros is to tell yourself you should be more attracted to someone. Tell yourself you should want to have sex with them more, et cetera, et cetera.

The Freedom to Be Just as Attracted as You Are

That is self-torture and it dampens and destroys eros. So the first thing I want to say to you is you really do have the freedom to be just as attracted as you are. Now that said, I got to say a few more things, she also sounds amazing. I just love hearing these stories about people who are in attractions of inspiration, and 25 amazing qualities, oh man, she sounds great in those ways. So here’s what I want to say. Back up on the sexual attraction issue, and what I mean by that is don’t force yourself. Don’t force yourself to do things that you don’t want to do. If it’s possible that you’re someone that has fled intimacy before in the past, if you’re someone who has been able to sustain ongoing healthy relationships, and you’re doing this deeper work, and now you meet someone who’s a real attraction of inspiration, expect that at different points your attraction is going to plummet. It’ll go subterranean. It’ll disappear. One time that that happens, and I’m not saying this is your situation, but it’s an important thing to know is that when our feelings really drop, really drop down in a good way, really deepen, our sexual attraction often takes a pause. It just needs some time to kind of like get in sync with the growing depth of our feelings.

A Fabulous Combination of Skills

Also, when we’re with available people and we’re not used to that, we will have moments of panic and fear. If, at those times, we don’t allow for those moments and allow ourselves to breathe and we tell ourselves, “Well, I should be more attracted,” we will squash and diminish and compress a natural process of evolution and growth of depth of feelings. I’ve been there. I’ve done that so many times. So what I want to say to you is give yourself space. Don’t be more sexual than you’re ready to be at any given point. Don’t do that horrible thing of just telling yourself, “Oh God, I got to be more attracted.” Give yourself space. Think about the things you adore about her emotionally and enjoy those parts of her. Again, giving yourself space. Allow yourself to, in your mind, fetishize the things that turn you on about her physically, emotionally, ways of having sex that are really exciting to you. Allow yourself the room to play and to fantasize and to cultivate eros. It’s a fabulous combination of skills. It’s like the skill of thinking, “Well, what would really turn me on? No, I don’t want to do that yet, but oh, I could really picture just having our lips touch together for an extended period of time. Or touching her in this way or that way, or her touching me in those same ways.” These are just some examples and you let yourself have those feelings. You enjoy them, you build on them, and then you give it space and just enjoy this person.

Cultivating the Tendrils of Appreciation

My gut is that fear of intimacy is part of what’s going on here. But telling yourself you should be more attracted is only going to intensify that fear of intimacy. I would say give it space and also allow yourself to cultivate all the tendrils of appreciation, love, turn on, and take the pressure off and watch what happens. What you’re experiencing may be in part what I call the wave, the wave of distancing, which we experience when we finally meet someone who’s kind and decent and available and is not going anywhere, and our feelings kind of plummet, but that’s temporary. It’s like a wave. Because waves pass. So what I want to suggest is that you try these experiments and then come back to us and let us know what happens. If the turn-on doesn’t grow, give yourself space. But to me, if it’s a five or six, and if romantically you’re liking her this much, go with all the romance. Go with the five and six. Don’t pressure yourself but just enjoy it. Because once again, no matter what, this sounds like serious progress and it sounds like she is amazing. So the next question is from someone who had a Tinder date with somebody who she says “was really into me right after the match, which made me a little bit uncomfortable.” Then she says, “I just wanted to thank you because thanks to everything you’ve said in your podcast episode over the last few months, I allowed myself to trust my instinct.”

Questions About Love and Honoring Boundaries

So from the very beginning of the conversation, some things just weren’t right for me, but I thought, “Well, let’s just keep talking,” which is great and make it as interesting as possible, “and let’s share whatever we have to share,” which is great, giving it a chance. That’s me talking. She said, “But then the more he talked, the more I could tell that there were some values we did not have in common. I was starting to feel uncomfortable in my body. He pushed really hard and he wanted to have dinner over even before lockdown has ended,” which she felt was definitely not right and she said no. She said, “I felt really strong saying no to him. I was anchored in my response and I’m really glad, now, two hours later, that I trusted my instinct and that I set my limits and I honored my boundaries and I expressed those boundaries.” She said, “It’s such a good feeling. This is a matter of identity of boundaries and of feeling heard and respected. And I heard myself and respected myself in the presence of someone who didn’t feel right to me.” So she said, “I did not set up another Tinder date with him and no dinner by the river or anywhere,” and she feels really great about this and she just said thank you so much. So I don’t know what I want to say about this except celebration, and that act of really being able to honor our instinct when our instinct says, “No, I want less. No, I need space. I feel pushed,” and she said, “I don’t feel right in my body.”

Your Questions About Love Require Dropping Down Into Your Body

When we drop down into our body, we learn so much when we’re with somebody. This is an exercise that I really adore, which is on a date, in a relationship dropping down into your body, into your gut. As we say in Jewish, your kishkas, your gut.

Just notice what the weather is like in there and that will tell you so, so much. This is a way of living in your own intimacy genius. When we do that, we make so many better choices. How many of us have stayed in relationships that didn’t feel right because we didn’t trust ourselves or we listened to the other person as they told us not to trust ourselves.

So three cheers to all of you. Actually, this is a fabulous question for everybody to think about right now. If you’re dating anybody or in your last date, what did you feel in your body? What was the weather like inside of you deep down, in their presence and with the chemistry between the two of you? This is a question that I always encourage people to put as their primary number one question: does my soul feels safe with this person? If you can say yes to that and if you’re with someone you’re attracted to and you’re connected to, that is just the most wonderful thing. So this listener, her soul did not feel safe with this person and she freed herself from the compulsion of having to be nice or do what he wanted and she said no, and she felt fabulous afterwards.

A Powerful Way to Crack the Spine of Our Fear of Rejection

I want to say one more thing about this. One of the most powerful ways to crack the spine of our fear of rejection, and all of us have fear of rejection, some worse than others, more intensely than others, is to say, “My goal is just to be me, just to be me, and to notice, ‘Does my soul feel safe with the person I’m seeing?'” If the answer’s yes, then this is really good. This is what I wanted. If the answer’s no, then it ain’t me and it’s not for me. I think this is a beautiful, beautiful process. When we do that, we worry a lot less about being rejected. So the last question, somebody said, “Ken, I wonder if you have any advice on the prospect of a breakup. My partner had brought up this idea a couple of nights ago, and it obviously feels awful, and we’ve been communicating and sharing with each other since then. She describes a series of really difficult events. One event is that they had a recent miscarriage just in mid-March and another is that his dog is in the process of passing away and that dog is now staying with his ex-girlfriend. His girlfriend, they were together for 10 years, and he’s still grieving that.” The person who is calling in also says, “I’m realizing that I haven’t been very supportive of his grieving process.” So she says, “I still feel hopeful and I feel like this could be workable, but it hurts and it feels like a very big mess. So do you have any ideas, any advice, any suggestions?”

Tough Questions About Love in the Time of Grief

What I want to say is that there is so much grief around this. Also, one piece I left out is she said that they got a puppy together, and at the same time as they got a puppy, which he felt was premature, he’s not only grieving his ex but he’s grieving the dog that is currently passing away. So I think that there are so many rich metaphors here, and I think that this is a hard situation because there’s so much pain to be processed. I want to honor, this is such a complicated situation, and I just want to talk about really complicated relationship situations. I do think after years of doing this work in my own life and as a therapist and as a coach, that when we stay hopeful, when we take the next right step, the way that I think about this is like a really horribly complicated knot. We look at it and we say, “Oh God, I can never figure this out,” but what do you do? You look at the first piece. You say, “What can open? What can move here? What piece of this knot can be opened up?” and you do that. When you do that, the knot tends to loosen to some degree. So I want to point out in what you wrote, one place that you were acknowledging a piece of the knot that you can work with, and it’s that you have not been that supportive of him with all of this tremendous grief: the grief of the miscarriage, the grief of the loss of his relationship of 10 years, the grief of the loss of his dog.

Finding an Intimacy Treasure

So you have an insight here and the insight is, “I could have seen him more. I could have made more space for him.” Now, whatever happens, you found an intimacy treasure in that knowledge and I would say go with that piece of the knot that you can open up and tell him that you recognize this and actually practice giving him more space. Now, this is at a very difficult time though, because he’s grieving and he wants to break up. Now, when someone says they want to break up, like Oprah says, she says, “Listen to what men say and listen to what women say.” If someone says that, he might really, really mean it. But I would say that there’s such a tangled knot of grief here that my big suggestion is to get help from a couples therapist. One particular kind of school of therapy that I think is really wonderful is Imago Therapy because it sounds like both of you have a lot of deep listening to do with each other. When we try to deep listen with someone we love in a place of pain, we deep listen for a period of time and then we veer off into our own circuitry. Imago Therapy, that’s spelled, I-M-A-G-O, created by Harville Hendrix and Helen LaKelly Hunt is just one type of couples therapy, but it’s one that feels particularly right potentially on a gut level to me hearing this, for you to explore because you will both learn to do deeper listening and making space for each other. That’s a kind of very treasured thing.

Working With the Pools of Connection and Compassion

If there’s hope, it seems to me, the hope would lie in having there being space for the two of you and having you both be able to grieve. I just want to acknowledge, this was kind of stuck in there, but the miscarriage for you, and what about that grief? What about that grief? How has that affected you? Has he been there for you around that? What’s it been like between the two of you? So this is another question that I think is worthy of exploring. So those are my suggestions here. This is a very complicated thing, but if you can work with the pools of potential compassion and connection that show themselves and do that continuously over time, you’ll be moving in a direction of healing, no matter which way it ends up going. So I just want to acknowledge how painful and difficult this is, but also your commitment for wanting to keep love and keep intimacy and how much that matters to you. That’s all we’re going to have time for today. These are rich and wonderful questions. Recently, I’ve gotten in a big influx of new questions so I’m going to have to be doing another Q&A pretty soon. You can go to deeperdatingpodcast.com and click on Ask Ken, and leave me a message. If you feel comfortable with me playing the recording of your message, let me know that in the message and I will do so. So thank you all for listening. If you would like to join my mailing list, just go to deeperdatingpodcast.com, and I look forward to seeing you on the next episode of the Deeper Dating Podcast.

The 5 most important points in early dating often decide the course of your romantic future. At each of these points, there are intimacy-skills that make all the difference in the world. In this episode, you’ll learn the key skills to navigate these crucial points with wisdom, self-love and bravery.

Table of Contents

• The First Among the Most Important Points in Early Dating
• The Best Places to Meet People
• Important Points in Early Dating That Lead to Happiness
• The Single Greatest Saboteur of Healthy, New Love
• Honesty and Truth Play Important Points in Early Dating

Episode Introduction: Important Points in Early Dating

There are five points in the early dating journey where there needs to be an infusion of a few wisdom skills. In this episode, I’ll tell you what each of those five points are and the skills that will help you move through those stages to help you be able to find the love that you are seeking. Stay tuned to the Deeper Dating Podcast to learn more. Hello, and welcome to the Deeper Dating podcast. I’m Ken Page, and I’m a psychotherapist and the author of the book Deeper Dating and the host of this show. And today, I’m going to be talking about five particular points in the early dating journey where just a few skills can change your entire future in love and intimacy. And I’ll be telling you what those points are, and what those skills are. This week and every week, I’m going to bring you the greatest tools that I know to help you find beautiful love and keep it flourishing. Because the skills of dating are nothing more than the skills of intimacy. And the skills of intimacy are the greatest skills of all for a happy and rich life. If you want a transcript of this episode, just go to deeperdatingpodcast.com. You’ll find it there. If you join my mailing list, you’ll find out about a host of free resources, and courses and classes. And you’ll also get a free gift.

Subscribe and Leave Ken a Review

I also just want to say that everything I say in this podcast is educational in nature. It’s not medical or psychiatric advice. if you feel you need help with serious psychological issues, please do seek professional help. Finally, if you like what you’re hearing here, it would be a wonderful gift if you could leave me a review and subscribe. Thanks so much for that. Now I want to jump in. So I think that there are five points that you could kind of think of as trigger points. Points that are super, super important, where there are choices that you make that affect the rest of your future in dating. Hence, the rest of your future in life. I want to point out what those points are. And then I want to say that what I really believe is that if we can kind of do a trigger point injection of just a few really important skills at each one of these five points, the degree of empowerment, and healing, and change that will happen can truly be profound. I constantly, constantly hear from people who are saying, “I’m experiencing relationships now that are intimate and connected, and warm and healthy.” Maybe sometimes people say it for the very first time and it’s because they are implementing these skills which are not Ken Page skills or Deeper Dating skills. They’re just the skills of love and the skills of intimacy. So let me share these with you.

The First Among the Most Important Points in Early Dating

The first point that I think is a really key point is an online dating point. It’s the creation of your profile. I just want to say a few things about creating your profile. What you want to do in your profile, and this is really important is to kind of show who you authentically are. Which means the things that matter to you, the things that bother you, the things that bring you joy. The things mostly that give you meaning, and that you have passion about. You want to describe yourself in a positive way. You don’t want your profile to be, “I don’t want this. I don’t want this. I don’t want this.” Of course, it’s important to list the things that are just absolute deal-breakers. But we definitely don’t want to come from a jaded place in doing our profile.

The main thing is that we want to reflect who we are. So if there are stories that you can tell about things that have happened to you or things that you’ve done, that really kind of relate to what you want to capture but what you’re looking for and what matters to you. That is a great thing to do.

Don’t worry about being witty. Don’t worry about being funny, and charming, and writing this perfect highly polished profile. I mean, it’s nice to have a really nice profile. I am all for that and you definitely want to show that you put time and effort into it. But you can also show the real you, and that’s such an important thing to do.

A Metaphor for Your Entire Dating Journey

This is a metaphor for your entire dating journey. It’s that experience of saying, “This is who I am and I love it and I’m going to be this person. I’m looking for people who really, really like what I have to say. And anyone else just is not for me.” So there’s a huge metaphor there. There’s a universality to what you do when you do your profile because it’s like what you’re going to do when you do your dating. The other thing I want to say is that when you look for pictures, of course you want pictures that make you look really good, that show you in your best light. But find pictures as well that show you glowing. You with that kind of quality that the people who love you the most would see these pictures and say, “That is really you.” In other words, do not be afraid to show yourself. So this is just some points that I think are really important in writing your profile, that we don’t always get taught. We get veered down the direction that we have to be really witty, and really charming, and whatever else. So yes, authenticity in your profile written from the heart is a big deal. It will draw people who are interested in finding someone like you. These are all obvious things, but they’re really important things. So the second kind of trigger point, choice point, really important juncture or nexus in the process is looking for people, searching for people. This applies in the online world and the in-person world as well.

To Feel Safe Inside Is an Important Point in Early Dating

This is something I’ve said so many times, and I will say so many more times. It is a sweet, and powerful, and transformative tool. And that is that when you meet people, you think, “With whom does my soul feel safe? Does my soul feel safe with this person?” Now that doesn’t mean that the person isn’t exciting. That the person doesn’t challenge you to think in new ways or do new things. All of those things are wonderful. But it’s a sense of safety that you feel inside that is like, “I could build a home in the world with somebody who has these qualities.” Now of course you won’t go that far, necessarily in the first date. But you will quickly, especially when you make this a conscious question, you will begin to sense when your soul feels safe with someone. When you make that a really clear goal, you will notice people with whom your soul feels safe and you will be more attracted to them. And I believe you will attract those people more. So that’s pretty amazing. I talk a lot about two circuitries of attraction that we all have. One circuitry of attraction that we have is attractions of inspiration. That’s where we can get turned on, fall in love, get sexually excited by someone who’s not only attractive but has a deep goodness. And the combo of those two things together is what we are looking for.

The Best Places to Meet People

So when you search, when you look at people’s profiles, when you’re at a party, notice how a person makes you feel inside. Because you will notice quickly their quality of integrity, their quality of warmth. You may not know it all right away, but you will notice quickly. So search for those things. And really, really, really believe that one of the best places to meet people is an environment with people where people who share your values and passions congregate. This could be online, and it could be in real-time. But it’s a big, big, big deal. It’s a bigger deal than most people realize. Because when you’re in those environments, you shine. There’s a sense of connection that can happen. So that’s another really important point in the search process. If you’re doing that online, you can filter and search for qualities, attributes, and passions that you are most interested in. The last thing I want to say about this second point is this. Stretch your boundaries. Stretch your boundaries. If somebody lived 200 miles or 100 miles outside of your end zone of how far you’re willing to travel, and that person would be the soulmate of your life, would you say no to that person because they live that much further? Would you say no to your future with that person because they were just those extra miles? I doubt it. If the person was an inch or two taller, an inch or two shorter, five years older, five years younger. If you had this experience of deep desire, deep connectedness, and a shared sense of wanting to share your lives together, would you say no because of those issues?

One of the Most Important Points in Early Dating Is to Soften Your Requirements

So I want to really encourage you to soften your requirements in these initial stages. Really soften and stretch them to the degree that you possibly can. Then notice the chemistry and the connection. Because one thing about love that’s really funny is I feel like it kind of tweaks our nose. Because the person that we end up with who’s really wonderful for us is just not at all who we pictured. I think that’s a really important thing is to be able to stretch wider and further around all these things that I’m talking about here. Even educational level. Somebody might be of higher education than you’re necessarily comfortable with. But that’s you stopping yourself. Someone might not have the degree that you require and could be brilliant in many different ways, apart from book learning. So another area where I encourage you to stretch. I feel that people don’t stretch enough in those areas. But the area that I often, often, often, often wish people stretched more in my classes and my courses, in the emails I get, in the clients that I work with, I see this again and again when it comes to character, when it comes to someone being committed to treating you well. You do not want to stretch in those things. You want someone who has curated a life of decency, a life of integrity. You do not want anyone else. You want to be that kind of person too. So I think that’s a really important thing. If someone treats you badly and it’s a real habit of theirs to treat you badly, that’s just not okay.

The Initial Reaching Out

Now if you find that happening and you share what you need, what doesn’t work with the person and they respond, and they listen, and they hear it, well, that’s what good relationships are made of. But if someone is hurtful consciously again and again, and they gaslight you about it, they say it’s not a big deal, they want you to kind of let go of it and just keep moving on, that’s not okay. So that’s where I encourage you to be even more discriminating. So the third stage that I just want to share some thoughts are about the initial reaching out. Now, this initial reaching out might happen in person and it might happen online. But there are just a few really important points that I want to make.

The first point is this, modern dating culture has sped things up so quickly that there’s not really enough space for graciousness, kindness, generosity, and listening. You want to hold all of those things. You want to be kind. You want to be gracious. You want to be thoughtful. And if other people aren’t, then you recognize that. You want someone who recognizes those qualities and reflects them back.

This is how instantly you could save huge amounts of time by just being kind of this very warm, decent, caring you. If someone doesn’t get it, if they walk on it, if they can’t give that back, then you know right there. So you’re setting a higher bar and that’s a beautiful and good thing to do. I highly encourage it, highly encourage it. Because you want someone who is essentially kind, and decent, and thoughtful in those same ways.

Important Points in Early Dating That Lead to Happiness

These are the things that really lead to happiness and we swallow our sensitivity. We say, “No, I should get used to this unkindness. I should get used to this cocky, arrogant attitude.” No, we should not be getting used to that stuff. Then another one is bravery. Really kind of developing the muscle of approaching people or talking to people who interest you. And when I used to lead Deeper Dating events in person, which is how I began in this whole journey, there was a period where people had to give out their phone numbers. These were in-person events. People had to give out their phone numbers. The rule of the game was that if someone gave you their number, you had to thank them and then have a moment of gratitude. To just honor that this was a gift. You did not have to call them if you really chose not to. Some people were built and did things in such a way that they would want to let somebody know. This is not really a match. Other people often felt like, “Well, I wouldn’t want somebody to do that to me. I don’t want to get a message like that. I’d rather they just don’t contact me.” So people made their own rules, but the ground rule was you always said thank you. And what people would discover is that they would build a muscle of going up to strangers, or smiling at strangers, or starting a conversation with strangers. It’s hard and it’s scary. But man, that is a really beautiful and important skill.

Moments of Bravery

It’s almost like every one of those moments where you’re brave like that. It’s like you’re visiting a foreign country for the first time. There’s an excitement. There’s an adventure. There’s a fear. Really those moments of bravery are incredible things. I know how hard they can be, but I want to really encourage that kind of bravery. So then the next point is like first few dates. Bunch of things I want to say about that. One thing is that if there is some spark because you cannot force sexual interest. It’s kind of cruelty to yourself to force yourself to be attracted to someone who you’re not attracted to. But if the person is kind of hot, if there’s kind of a spark, if there’s kind of a sense of potential sexual interest. If there are parts of their body, or their face, or their laugh that yeah, turn you on, even though other parts don’t as much. And they’re awesome people and you love who they are, stick with it. Because it will not stay static. In time, you’re either going to get more attracted to them and they’ll get more beautiful to you. Then you’ll know what to do, or they won’t. You’ll just really see nope, nope, it’s not going in that direction. I know it’s not and then you honor that as well. But don’t just look for the people with whom you unequivocally are completely sexually attracted to, right from the start. Look for people with whom there’s a spark and then get to know who they are. This is a big deal. It’s really, really important.

Allowing Gentler Sparks and Enjoying the Person Are Important Points in Early Dating

And even if you’re really, really, if you have hair-trigger eyes, that it’s got to be an exact, certain type, just watch. When you let yourself be with people who there’s some spark with and you let yourself fantasize about those sparky places with them and there’s a goodness, and a decency, and a wonderfulness in your connection, stuff grows. And the research shows the majority of people who were in good longterm relationships did not have love at first sight. So just an interesting thing to note. So that’s one thing that’s really important is allowing a gentler spark and enjoying the person and getting to know them and giving space for that spark to grow. The other thing I just want to say about this is what we know is that those people who make us crazy, crazy, crazy attracted, from the beginning, very, very often are not available or aren’t going to treat us quite right. And something inside our psyche knows this and wants to prove our worth by getting them to embrace us. Because we know that somehow they won’t fully do that. Sometimes the people who we kind of feel that they really will embrace us for who we are we feel a little like, “Ew.” For those of us who have self-esteem issues, that’s a normal thing. I call it the wave. I write about it a lot. I speak about it a lot. I have had it a lot. That’s not for this episode.

The Single Greatest Saboteur of Healthy, New Love

But I think it’s the single greatest saboteur of healthy, new love. So I would say look in my book, look in my online course, or just look up the episodes where I speak about the wave so you can learn more about that. When you’re on your date with someone, don’t play it cool. Don’t do that. It won’t work. It’s so not worth it. Talk about what you’re passionate about. Listen to what the other person is passionate about. Because truly, truly, truly and the research backs this up, listening well is an aphrodisiac. Not listening is a turnoff. Now if you’re drinking on the first date and you’re drinking a bunch, you will not even really notice probably. But if you’re sober and you’re noticing, you will be able to tell – it’s just the best feeling when someone does deep listening. So listening is a glorious aphrodisiac. Talking about what you’re passionate about, eliciting what the other person is passionate about, and being just a little bit extra real, and extra authentic. That kind of shifting from a smooth surface of who you think you’re supposed to be to the textured surface where people can really feel the gritty essence of your being, your saltiness, your humanity, your imperfections, your vulnerability. That stuff’s really sexy and awesome. I quote this often, Brene Brown says, “ vulnerability – it is the last thing we want to show, but the first thing we look for in another person.” And along that kind of direction of things, one last thing I want to say is that the research shows that playing hard to get is not the way to go.

Showing Enthusiasm Is One of the Most Important Points in Early Dating

This is researched information. The way to go is to show your enthusiasm. Of course, then you want to give the person space because they might be kind of integrating that sense of, “This person really likes me.” That may take a little bit for them to integrate that. So they may not instantly act as enthusiastically right back, but you will know. And if they’re not interested, then that is another thing you’ll know. But, the risk of showing your enthusiasm is dramatically less than the risk of showing coolness and coldness and acting like you don’t care. Or that you’re not excited about someone when in fact you are. So allow yourself that joy of enthusiasm. So the last kind of site in this early dating journey that I want to talk about now is when feelings start to grow. So I’m not going to talk much now about if feelings aren’t growing, that’s a kind of separate issue. But I’m going to talk about what happens when you’re dating someone and feelings begin to grow. What I want to say is, and I’ve said this in other episodes, don’t have sex too early. Don’t have sex when you’re intoxicated early on. Because your first sex should not be when you’re intoxicated if you can avoid that. Because what happens is there are repercussions for many of us when we have sex too early. Where we either get really kind of needy and clingy and insecure. Or we just want to get the hell out of dodge. We just want to get away.

A Back and Forth Between Excitement and Fear

It is best to wait until this amazing, amazing process that happens when the bond with someone starts growing. Because your brain, your heart, your sexuality, all starts specializing in your connection with this person. Like invisible tendrils of connection start to develop in your psyche for them. It’s a very beautiful and gentle thing. You don’t want to force it to go quicker than it’s ready to go. Now that does not mean that you cannot and should not be having sexual fantasies about that person and enjoying, picturing different sexual and sensual things with them. That is all wonderful. Putting aside if you have sexual compulsion issues, that’s an area to get support on and be careful about the advice that I just gave, might need a little bit of modification there. This is such an exciting time and such a scary time and the tendency might be not to show your enthusiasm because it feels so risky. But again, it is fine to show your enthusiasm. But just give the other person space too. Because especially in these early stages for many of us, there’s a back and forth between excitement and fear, excitement and fear. So you want to give the person space to breathe. That’s a really good thing to do. Now that does not mean that you get to text them and they don’t answer you for three days. That’s just not nice. So you have a right to say what you need in terms of communication. But it is an important time to know that you will have fears and the other person will have fears at different points.

The Key to Handling the Wave

But as the feelings grow, you might have the wave experience, which I talked about just a few moments ago. And as I said there, I guess I will say something about the wave here. And that is that the wave is when you meet someone, and you like them, and they like you and they feel decent, and they feel available. All of a sudden, your sense of desire just kind of drops. It disappears. You find things that irritate you about them. You feel kind of horrible because you don’t want to feel obligated, but you have absolutely no feelings for this person anymore. Your feelings just disappeared. All of a sudden, they just irritate you and you feel nothing for them. You hear me speaking passionately because this wave dynamic is what stopped me from being able to have a relationship for countless years of my life.

The key to handling the wave is not to run, and not to suffocate yourself by bringing on more closeness than you’re ready for. Giving yourself enough space that there’s air between the two of you, that there’s room to breathe, that you don’t feel suffocated. But not fleeing all together. Taking the space you need, which is a beautifully adult action.

When you can do that, and when the other person allows that, in very many cases, you will feel the energy of desire kind of whooshing in again. Coming back, even though it felt like it disappeared. This is something I learned through a lot of work. I’ve worked with so many people, so many of us experienced the wave. So that’s another point that I want to make.

Honesty and Truth Play Important Points in Early Dating

Another point I want to make is the importance of honesty and truth. That it’s really important that your partner gets a sense of your realness and your vulnerability. This beginning stage is so precious and so wonderful. Now because it’s so exciting, and it’s so charged, and it’s also so scary, we need the help of friends, coaches, therapists very often in this phase. Because in this phase, we get afraid and we enact patterns that push intimacy away unconsciously. We think we know just what we’re doing. But when we talk to a friend, our friend says, “Well, that wasn’t really that nice.” Or, “Maybe you weren’t really hearing what they said.” Or, “I don’t think they meant it that way.” Or, “No, ask him to go to the museum with you.” So thank God for friends in this stage, because we get scared and we start acting in old ways. At this point, when you’ve integrated these different skills into each one of these kind of trigger points. When you’ve been able to inject this wisdom and goodness, and kindness, and intimacy skills into each one of those points, your dating life and your dating experience is going to be immensely different and you will find in almost all cases that the quality of your dating life changes and that you are much, much more likely to meet people and bond with people who truly, truly are good for you. That’s what we want. These are the skills that we don’t get taught that set us on a path that really leads to love.

Afterword

So I’m so happy to be able to share these particular skills and these particular points with you. Thanks so much for listening, and go to deeperdatingpodcast.com to join my mailing list and get a free gift. And I look forward to seeing you on the next episode of the Deeper Dating podcast.

If you want to cultivate authentic intimacy in online dating, here’s the most important thing to know: It’s not about tricks and gimmicks. It’s about the bravery to be yourself! In this episode, the wonderful Jordan Gray teaches the steps we need to take to do exactly that. There are love-lessons ( and life lessons!) in this episode that are truly not to be missed!

Table of Contents

• How to Bring Romance and Authentic Intimacy in Virtual Dating
• Honest Communication Promotes Authentic Intimacy
• Powerful Qualities That Attract Authentic Intimacy
• A Deeply Held Belief in Society
• Baby Steps Towards Authentic Intimacy
• An Externalized Conversation on a Best Case Scenario
• The Most Significant Front-Of-Mind Theme

Episode Introduction: Authentic Intimacy

How do you bring real authenticity and vulnerability and aliveness and eros to virtual dating. Stay tuned to the Deeper Dating podcast. As I interview Jordan Gray and he teaches us powerful methods for doing that both in our virtual dating life and our real-time dating life. Hello, everybody and welcome to the Deeper Dating Podcast. I’m Ken Page and I’m a psychotherapist and the author of the best-selling book, Deeper Dating: How to Drop the Games of Seduction and Discover the Power of Intimacy. Today, I’m going to be talking with the truly inspiring relationship coach, the author Jordan Gray about how to bring deep authenticity, romance, and when the time is right, hot sex into your virtual dating life. Every week, I’m going to share with you the greatest tools I know to help you find love and keep it flourishing and heal your life in the process because the skills of dating are nothing more than the skills of love and skills of love are the greatest skills of all for a happy life. If you want to learn more about the deeper dating path to real intimacy, just go to deeperdatingpodcast.com. If you sign up for my mailing list, you’ll get free gifts and you’ll learn about how to use these ideas to transform your own intimacy journey. You’ll also find a complete transcript of this and every other episode. Also, I just want to say that everything I share in this podcast is educational in nature. It’s not medical or psychiatric advice or treatment. If you’re experiencing any serious psychological or psychiatric conditions, please seek professional help.

Subscribe and Leave Ken a Review

Finally, if you like what you’re learning here, it would be a fabulous thank you if you subscribe on iTunes or elsewhere and left me a review, so thanks so much for that. Now, let’s jump in. I want to introduce my guest who actually I think I did my first podcast interview ever with Jordan. It still really stands out as a very special experience. Jordan Gray is a five-time number one Amazon best-selling author and a public speaker and a relationship coach with more than a decade of practice behind him. His work has been featured in the Times, BBC, Forbes, Self, Cosmopolitan, Entrepreneur, Elephant Journal, Good Men Project, and countless other publications around the globe. He’s made it his life’s mission to make thriving relationships attainable to everyone. Since 2009, his writing has reached an audience of well over 80 million people from around the world. In the course of this interview, you’ll see why because the blend of smarts and passion for growth and true authenticity just shines from this guy. Jordan, it’s great to have you here. Jordan: Ken, it’s so good to be here. I appreciate you having me so much, and yes, the interview that we did three or four years ago still holds a massive place in my heart, so I’m very happy to be here. Ken: I’m so glad. We’re going to jump in and talk about so many different things, but both of us have agreed that a lot of people are wondering, how the hell do you do a virtual date and have it not be boring or flat or go too far, too fast or not have a quality of aliveness?

How to Bring Romance and Authentic Intimacy in Virtual Dating

Ken: What can you do to create virtual dating situations that feel organic, that allow connection, that build connection and that really work to further a relationship when you can’t be together in person? I know you wrote a blog post recently on having wonderful sex on Zoom or a virtual date. I wanted to expand this to absolutely talk about sex, but also talk about early dating, talk about how to bring romance and authenticity into every stage of the dating process when you’re doing it virtually. I’d love to hear any of your thoughts and reflections on this. Jordan: Absolutely, yeah, I think the first thing that I want to touch on is really acknowledging that just because there are now screens involved or at least more heavily involved than they might have been before doesn’t mean that the foundational guidelines don’t apply. Ken: Right. Jordan: I was talking to someone the other day and they’re saying that “Oh, I’ve been talking to my parents more than I had. I’m talking to my parents more in the last month than I had in the years prior. I don’t know how to have a conversation with them via Zoom.” I was like, “Well, did you not have a conversation with them before? Are you really blaming the virtual medium or was it just already sticky and that’s just being done, much more highlighted in conscious awareness?

The Discomforts of Doing Online Dating

Jordan: The foundational guidelines of dating kind people and being honest about the truth of who you are and what you’re looking for, these things still apply as much as they ever have, if anything, because we don’t have the distraction of meeting up for a first date with someone and having physical attraction take up a lot of your mental and emotional bandwidth. It’s now much easier to not drown in our projections and stories of who the person is or who we’re trying to present ourselves at. There’s the opportunity for a bit more rawness and direct communication right out the gate. I think that is something interesting that I’ve been hearing from a lot of my clients lately is just, “I could hide in certain ways by showing up as my absolute best self in a face-to-face first date, but now with just communication or just a video chat, it’s that much harder to juggle the plates of falsity and pretend that we are something that we aren’t.” Ken: I love that. There’s so much in that. It makes me think of something Marianne Williamson said where she said, “Sometimes getting naked is the quickest way to avoid really getting naked.” That’s one piece of this, but the other piece is so interesting what you brought up that the discomforts that we feel in doing online dating are reflective of discomforts often that are there anyway and this highlights that for us. Jordan: Exactly. I think it is a bit more stripped down.

Up Leveling Your Levels of Honest Communication

Jordan: Even if you do put on a full face of makeup, you can’t hypnotize someone with your amazing perfume or cologne when you’re just sitting and looking at them via FaceTime and that’s the extent of the connection or relationship that you’ve had with them thus far. Ken: There you are and you’re having a date with someone and you feel this, I don’t know, maybe a flatness or a one-dimensionality because that sexual feeling, that erotic feeling, that romantic feeling, that that feeling of physical chemistry just can’t be there. What do you do at that moment to take advantage of the situation, to make it work, to go deeper? Any thoughts on that? Jordan: Yes, the most important thing that I would highlight is up-leveling your levels of honest communication. I would say the same thing to people that are in an early relationship but are not self-isolating together, so they’re in separate homes. When the nourishment of physical touch is absent, it’s imperative that you up-level your honest communication. I do the same thing for people that are early in their dating process, on the first date or even in the first several dates. I think it really behooves people to be as clear and honest and direct about themselves and the reality of their lives and their emotions than they necessarily would on an in-person first date.

Honest Communication Promotes Authentic Intimacy

Jordan: I think that the falseness, because there is a sense of falseness or the diet soda version of human connection, online versus in person. I think that any whittling away of our truth is just that much more felt by anyone when it’s, “Okay, this is through a screen and on person, and so if I’m also trying to hide the truth of my heart or the truth of my core gifts, I think that that sting is felt to a much higher degree.”

Honest, direct communication even more so than you would naturally or appropriately “give” according to the majority of societal dating rules – it’s that much more important to really not hide in the early dating process.

Ken: Wow. First of all, I don’t think I’ve ever heard anybody express this instruction in that kind of a clear way. I just think for all of the countless millions of people, single, coupled, anything – wondering about dealing with the flatness of a virtual screen when you’re communicating, what you just said, Jordan, is brilliant and so incredibly important. I just want to say that when you’re hanging out with Jordan, which I have never done live, but we’ve done it on video, you instantly feel that, Jordan, you just keep calibrating toward authenticity. Whatever is going on, you’re just calibrating toward the authenticity of your heart. You’re a living example of doing that, which is fabulous. Jordan: Thank you. Ken: It’s really true, but so now, I want you to take us through how the hell to do that. I’d like you to take us through that for people who are newly dating.

How to up Level Your Authenticity

Ken: How do you up-level your authenticity, the honesty of your communication, when you’re in a first or second date? I’m going to take you through the whole thing here of relationships, but let’s start there. Any thoughts or reflections you have about that? Any guidance? Jordan: Sure. I think that in chronological order, one of the most high-leverage things that people can do is really audit your relationship history and see the ways that you’ve either been most prone to hiding or certain aspects or gifts of yourself that you have been the fastest to tuck in your back pocket and go, “This part is not safe to talk about, so I’m going to really put this way on the backburner, on the top shelf.” Just really auditing where am I most prone to hiding? That doesn’t mean that every person that you go on a first date with and the first 10 minutes of meeting them virtually, especially that they inherently deserve your deepest truths. “Well, I’m just going to be irresponsible with my energy and just dump all of my baggage at this person’s screen and then expect them to deal with it because,” that’s not necessarily self-honoring either, but yeah, I think really auditing, “How do I hide them most? If I know that the depth of my ability to love or my sensitivity or my caring or my high-powered career, whatever it is for the individual, whatever those things are, you go, “This is the least safe part of myself to bring.” Really monitor moment to moment, “Did I just go through an hour and a half long FaceTime, Zoom, Skype call with our first date?

How Soon Is Too Soon

Jordan: If I really look back on how I’m showing up, did I make sure to tiptoe around that and avoid it at all costs, and if so, how do I think I’m benefiting from that practice?” If I were to even allude to, or gently drop hints, that these are significant aspects of myself or important things that I’m looking for in a relationship, I think that is actually much more self-honoring to be direct and clear about, “Well, here’s really a piece of the center of who I am.” If this is something that is immediately a red flag or something the other person doesn’t want or isn’t at a point in their journey where they are willing to love or accept or appreciate that, then that’s fine and you can save both of yourselves the time. To me, this is the same thing as when female clients laugh like, “How soon is too soon to let a potential dating prospect know that I want kids?” I say, “As soon as there is any legitimate potential. As soon as there’s any chance of you thinking, ‘You know what? I’m pretty sure there’s something here,’ you’d want to be honest about that upfront or within the first couple of days instead of going, ‘Okay, well, I’ll just park this until four months in because I don’t want to appear as, fill in the blank, way that I secretly judged myself.'” Ken: I love this. I think, once again, you’re like hitting right in the center of the center. Just a couple of thoughts on this. I think this is where your workaround authenticity and my workaround authenticity joins so beautifully because that’s the place where our core gifts live.

Powerful Qualities That Attract Authentic Intimacy

Ken: We can all ask ourselves the question, “What am I most timid to reveal in my romantic life?” and those are qualities, core gifts, that are nuclear. They’re incredibly powerful. When we hide them, we flatten our beings. When we reveal them, yeah, we’re exposed and we’re vulnerable, but there is an aliveness. For someone who cares about that quality, that’s a swoony thing to hear people do that to reveal those parts of themselves. I loved that you said that about, “I want to have kids,” because so many women are just trained that like, “You’re just not supposed to say things that scare the man or your partner away.” I just have to tell a little story here which is a dear friend of mine. She did the rules, all that stuff for women that says, “Don’t chase the man. Don’t say too much. Don’t be too much. Don’t be too demanding.” She did that. She did that. She got some useful ideas out of it, but then she met this guy and she really, really liked him. It was early in their relationship and they were hiking together and she said to him, “All right. I got to tell you this. I want to have kids. I want a family and I want to have kids. If that doesn’t work for you, that’s really okay, but this feels like it could be going somewhere. I need to say this,” and she was terrified. He just looked at her and he said, “Where do I sign up?” They’re together maybe 20 years later. I just love that story because she was brave enough to really express what mattered to her. I love what you’re saying.

A Reflection of Inner Beliefs

Jordan: What a beautiful response too. I love the wording of, “Where do I sign up?” It’s like, “Yup, I’m down. Let’s do this. Two feet in? I’m available.”

I think that’s something that doesn’t get enough airtime, is that what you are, especially if there’s been a series or a pattern of unfamiliar relationships or you’ve had five potential partners in a row, that you found the same frustration with or the same thing that they weren’t accepting of or appreciate you over and over, this pattern of people that have been attracting, they’re all a reflection of your inner beliefs which includes your self judgments.

If you attract, to my writing, a lot of women who do have high-powered careers and are entrepreneurs or lawyers and very effective and out there in the world doing big important work and without fail, every single time a client like that comes to me and says, “Oh, all men are intimidated by me or every guy that I go out and meet, they just don’t like that I have a career and they feel small. They feel like they’re in my shadow,” it’s, at least thus far, always an instance of, “How are you making your career or your power or potency wrong because there’s some aspect of you that thinks, ‘Well, yeah, I am intimidating or I am too much in some way’?” Because there is that unconscious belief being held, those relegated to the shadow years or decades prior. The script precedes the actors. The script is in her mind.

Creating an Opening That Allows Authentic Intimacy to Come In

Jordan: The script is looking for actors to fill those roles and go, “Oh, see, he’s intimidated. There’s another one, so they’re all intimidated because I am too much. Just like my primary caregiver told me I was 30 or 40 years ago.” Really getting in touch with those aspects of going, “You know what? I don’t have to carry the story anymore. I don’t have to drop it entirely and have it go from 100% feels real and true to me to 0% I’m over it,” but at least having that sliver, that wedge of doubt of, “Okay, you know what? Maybe not everyone, maybe not all of the people think that I am too much in this way, and if I soften my own self-judgment, I’m creating that opening that then allows me to meet and attract people that also have a more beneficial or positive relationship to this thing in myself that I’m now making friends with.” Ken: Absolutely, and that’s a formula. If you have a pattern of meeting people who don’t know how to honor a particular part of you, you could be pretty sure that it’s a treasured important part of you that you haven’t been able to fully honor. I just want to say something here because this is a really important point to me, as a gay man who has been very hurt by gender role expectations.

Old Sexism in a New Age Bottle

Ken: When I hear a woman, a high-powered, accomplished woman say to me, “No, but I hear that if I let go of my femininity, I’ll never find an alpha male,” and then some really big important teachers saying the same thing which I think is old sexism in a new age bottle. There’s this cultural messaging for women about what femininity means and how being too in your power and in the joy of your empowerment scares men away. It’s just crippling, crippling advice. I just pray for the world to change more quickly around that. Jordan: Absolutely. I think that that’s one of the biggest, I see it as slow and it is happening, but I’m definitely in there, pushing the wedge in further and further and making it the best ability happen faster that, yes, this hyperpolarized 100 %, 0% ideologies of if you’re this gender or this orientation, you’d be extremely this and not the other side. I think that there’s a mass integration happening where people are having it be more of a continuum of, “You know what? I can be 80% this, 20% this or 50% this and 50% this and I can deploy these different energies or tones or temperaments in different aspects of my life with different people and the whole thing is just this ever-shifting collage.” What could be more healthy, whole, and integrated than having a massive toolbox that you don’t just have access to 20% of it and the rest are off-limits to you but every single tool is available to you.

A Deeply Held Belief in Society

Jordan: It’s the healthiest for your body, your heart, your sex life, your love life to say, “You know what? All of these are available to me. None of these are wrong, or shameful or incorrect. All of these tools are lovable and I’m allowed to deploy all of them in different areas of my life when I use my judgment to do so.” Ken: Absolutely. That’s one of the ways that the LGBTQ community has helped lead the way in the world. That’s also just a gift and I know that you, and I as a gay man, as a heterosexual man are so committed to that same kind of authenticity. Jordan: I wouldn’t say it baffles me, but it still fascinates me that one of the through lines of my work that still to this day gets the most pushback is I, semi-regularly, will post photos of myself or articles about the concept of male tears and men crying and how male emotionality is healthy and allowed and great and functional. I get just hundreds of people, almost exclusively men pushing back and just saying horrendous, nasty things, but there’s a part of me that’s excited by it. It’s like, “Okay, I’m hitting on this nerve that someone really deeply defends.” If I put out a single photo myself crying and a guy takes time out of his day to tell me that I’m ruining gender dynamics and like, “You have to stop this immediately,” and I’m like, “I’m really touching on something important. There’s a deeply held belief in society that still has not been eroded fully and there’s still work to do.” I welcome it and it’s exciting. I do see us as making progress overall.

How to Reveal Your Soul Qualities

Ken: Me too. This relates to what you just said, because everybody, the qualities that you have, that you hide because they seem too “masculine or feminine,” whatever those qualities are, are nuclear places. Those are core gift places and they apply to what Jordan just said, the qualities that feel, let’s say, too “feminine” for a man, too masculine for a woman, those are soul qualities and the degree to which we don’t treasure them is the degree to which we’re going to be attracted to people who also don’t treasure them. Super, super important thing. I just want to operationalize this a little bit more – so Jordan, could you just give an example, somebody who’s in a virtual date, it’s one of the early dating experiences with this person and they think, “Okay, here’s a part of me that I’ve been a little bit ashamed or awkward to talk about, but it’s at the center of me,” how they might do that and reveal it? Because you also said if you give it short shrift in a certain way, it might not work. I know so many people who share those parts of themselves in early dating, but they do it so timidly that the other person feels awkward too and doesn’t pick up and then the person feels like, “Oh, they don’t get this quality in me.” Could you just give us an example of how somebody might feel awkward about sharing a part of themselves and how they could do that in early dating? Jordan: Absolutely. Just to name directly, I think that leaning more towards, being overly clear and overly direct in the presentation of it or the asking of it, I think, it’s better safe than sorry.

At the Risk of Momentarily Neutralizing a Sense of Passion

Jordan: Yes, if you are lobbing out a thing that feels really like emotionally significant for you, but there’s even a chance of, “You know what? This thing that I’m sending off that might feel like a big obvious flare gun might not even be a blip on their radar,” if you’re not sure that it did land, then again, if it is one of the core gift, deeper things you might have held some wounding around in the past. I think that at the risk of momentarily neutralizing a sense of passion or romantic mystery. I think it’s better to be clear on those things than, “Oh, well, I put out this very subtle hint that they must have picked up on it and I’m going to now mindread and interpret through my bias filters and go, ‘Okay, well, I lobbed out that hint and they didn’t like it, so they probably hate that, so that part about me is still lovable thereby justifying my story or reinforcing it and never just ghosting them,'” because you think that they’re not aligned match. Just to give a more clear, direct example to continue on the thread that I was talking about before, I’ll just use one from my personal journey where there were so many years of my dating history where I did maintain that narrative that male emotionality was wrong or weak or disgusting or just wasn’t allowed like, “Here are emotions that my gender just are not allowed to display,” if they want to maintain any romantic relationships long term which of course is absolute BS.

Being Comfortable With Honesty

Jordan: But that would be something that I would name in my early dates. I wasn’t at all opposed on a first or second date, that again, there was any sense of, “Okay, I’m pretty sure this is going well and I’m liking where it’s going and I like everything I’m finding out about this person. I would just directly ask, “How do you feel about it when men cry?” and just let it be there and just get their honest response. Generally, by the time that I was comfortable enough to be asking this, that was when I was already starting to be on dates with, for me, women who were accepting and loving of these traits. Whereas years prior, when I wasn’t yet comfortable enough to ask the question if I had just like tried to hotwire the connection and asked it prematurely, I likely would have been on dates with women who would have been like, “No, I agree with the deepest beliefs of your self-judgment. I think that it is wrong and disgusting. How dare you to even bring this up on a first date? How wrong is that?” I think by the time you feel even tentatively, timidly ready to name the thing, you’re more likely than not, either on a date or soon to be on a date with someone, who will say, as that man said, “Where do I sign up?” Ken: That’s amazing and really true. I do just want to say like a yoga teacher who says, “Folks, if you need to modify, you can.” Jordan’s an athlete of authenticity. He climbs mountains. He scales cliff edges. He loves authenticity.

Baby Steps Towards Authentic Intimacy

Ken: If what he said feels like an aspiration, but you’re not quite there yet, notch it down as little as you can, but as much as you need to to make it work for you. If it’s progress and a step in that direction for you, three cheers because you will notice a difference. Jordan: Absolutely, self-compassion, and kindness and gentleness with your process is imperative at every step of the dating process. For someone who might hear what I’m saying and be intimidated by, “Oh, that’s like really direct and more than I could ever even imagine myself doing in three lifetimes,” just to give a bit of behind-the-scenes insight as to how I relate to that process, so maybe you can take some tiptoe baby steps towards being the mountain climbing athlete of authenticity. For me, I just so value my time and energy and heart and the time and energy of others that it doesn’t do anyone any favors to kick the ball down the field for months of dating with someone where there is the very flimsy potential of romantic connection. I would rather just go, “Okay, here is one of the small handful of things that I’m in touch with that I know, deeply matters to me. If we’re not a values fit, that doesn’t mean that you’re wrong. That doesn’t mean that I’m wrong. It doesn’t mean that either one of us isn’t enough or that anyone is being rejected wholesale. We’re just seeing if we have an aligned vision for our lives. That’s it. It doesn’t mean anything about us. We’re just checking in and going, ‘Does this work for the highest and best direction of both of our hearts?'”

A Positive Shift of Intentions

Ken: Doing that, going into a date, knowing that whatever those qualities are, that are so central, these core gift places, that your goal and your intention is to share that, reveal it, and only be with somebody who really appreciates that. When that becomes your intention, there’s an amazing side effect is that your fear of rejection diminishes. It actually really does. This is wonderful and it’s concrete and it’s scary and it’s gorgeous. I love it. Now, I’m going to move on to, okay, so you’ve had a few dates, you’re feeling turned on to this person. You’re feeling a sexual energy. You’re like, “I like this. I like him. I like her. I’m interested,” but there you are on a screen. How do you bring that in? Any thoughts in that early stage dating where you’re interested? This is a really interesting point because I think we have fears that if we go too far, too fast, it’s going to be like every other time we did online dating and went too far, too fast, and ended up disappointed. I think we’re careful about that. Then, I also think that we might feel like, “I need to hold this part of me until I actually meet this person and see who they are and what they what I think of them, and then also, it’s a little awkward to bring this sexual romantic stuff up on a virtual date in a way that it might not be so much at a lovely restaurant together.” Give us some guidance on authenticity as Eros enters the picture.

A Guide Towards Authentic Intimacy

Jordan: Absolutely, yes and one point I want to double down on there is both of those pathways are 100% valid. I think that there is validity for some people in following their energy and if there is a mutual sense of trust and alignment and real relationship potential and you want to move more towards the erotic in your relating, then amazing. Make sure you do it with someone you trust and talk through it in a consent-based way and like, “What are we to us? What are each of us excited to move towards in this process and if there is a sense of all those things are still true, that there’s a lot of passion and intensity and also grounded-ness and potential here?” I don’t yet want to cross that bridge of bringing sexual charge into a relationship in a video set or video chat sex kind of way and I want to just let this simmer until we’re able to meet face to face even if it’s months from now, that is also fine and you are not slow or rigid or prudish or any outdated words that people might use in the back of their psyche to make themselves wrong. I think both those things can absolutely be appropriate for different relational contexts. Ken: Let’s say you do the latter and you’re saying, “I’m not really wanting to like go and have like video sex before we actually meet in person,” but yet, it’s also not authentic to just pretend the Eros isn’t there and the turn-on is a beautiful sweet thing and that’s like part of romance and you don’t want to lose that and go flat. What do you do?

The Early Dating Version of Orgasm Denial

Jordan: Speaking in this current worldwide climate, I think there are both virtual and in-person, depending on the city, state, province, country, continent to the person who’s listening to this is coming from, you could go and have a socially distanced, two-meters away or six-feet away walk in nature together just to experience each other in the flesh at all. Ken: Good point. Jordan: And even that guarantee of, “Okay, we get to experience each other’s energy face to face and we’re not allowed to touch each other yet,” like that’s its own kind of erotic charge. Ken: It is. Jordan: It’s almost the early dating version of orgasm denial for BDSM lovers, like you’re right there. It’s been confirmed that “Yes, I’m even more attracted to you now and I’m not allowed to touch your flesh,” that’s almost like the Romeo and Juliet charge of the forbidden thing. Again, staying within your jurisdictions, legalities. Going back to the online video chat sex examples, I think that especially in early dating, really making sure that you’re doing it with someone you trust because there is the added layer of this person could take screen grabs or store some of this data if they wanted to. Just really making sure that this person, there’s real potential and they don’t remind you, they’re not a carbon copy of your last three abusive partners like, “No, this person really does feel safe and soft and grounded and aware of me and compassionate and kind.”

An Externalized Conversation on a Best Case Scenario

Jordan: Again, the same rules apply to the type of people that you would be physically intimate with in-person should be as relevant for you know, if not more relevant, to this medium and to build up the sexual tension, the sexual simmer. I think that having a externalized conversation around what a best-case scenario would look like for both of you, one thing that you would want to do, and once you get a clear picture of, “Okay, here’s what I’m into and looking for. Here’s what you’re into and looking for,” then you can sext around those themes in the lead up to build up the tension.” Just as you would for a first time and hopefully, it depends on the individual listening to this, but just as you would in leading up to a first sexual encounter with someone, you want to put some effort into your appearance. You want to be as you would. You want to be discovered naked for the first time with this person. Unless you’ve got a sweatshirt and sweatpants fetish, dressing up as you would for any date, I think, is appropriate when you have the dedicated explicit sexual meetup. Ken: Wonderful, wonderful. I just want to interject here that what you said first, Jordan, was again, injecting a radical authenticity into preparing for having sex together virtually, and instead of this assumption that we all kind of struggle with is that if we’re really sexually skilled and really gifted, we will just make the other person happy, but maybe the other person is thinking of something completely different than we are. Maybe their sexual and erotic language is really different.

Injecting Authentic Intimacy That Makes a Difference

Ken: The act of saying, “How would you like to lead up to this? How would you like to do this? What do you envision? What feels safe?” is again injecting this radical authenticity that’s going to make a really big difference. Jordan: 100%. I’m a huge fan of eradicating mindreading from relationships and sex lives. That can come in the form of, really, as you alluded to, really getting in touch with your sexual partners erotic blueprint, what types of things really turn them on, what they love the most, what things are no go zones, what turns them off quite rapidly. The same thing in early-stage or long-term relationships around if you can have very clear direct conversations of around, “Here are the cheat codes for arousing me or for loving me the most fully. While anticipating people’s needs and trying to have some educated guesses sprinkled in as nice surprises to show your thoughtfulness and compassion and care for your partner are important, I think that really just allowing ourselves to name directly and have our partners name to us, “Here’s exactly how to win with me in our relationships and in our sex lives,” I think is actually infinitely hotter. Because you’re actually giving them targeted, calibrated, thoughtful gifts instead of just, “Okay, here we are both just groping in the dark and trying to figure it out as we go.”

That kind of intentionality for me is the ultimate in loving someone. Love someone as they want themselves to be loved and the same thing applies to our sex lives.

A Vision of a More Authentic Life

Ken: Wonderful. That’s so exciting. I really feel like you’re giving us a vision of a braver, more intimate, more authentic, more evolved life. Jordan: That’s my aim. Ken: Yes, just another thought on this like homework that we can do in a sexual relationship is to think, “What makes me feel really safe. What moves me deeply in sex? What also really gets me hot and really excites me?” They’re connected questions, but they’re different questions and that act of first recognizing for ourselves what those things are and then speaking about them is just a beautiful process of evolution. Jordan: Absolutely. In case there is anyone listening to this and hearing all the talk of safety and warmth and consent as, “Oh, this is just tepid, lukewarm. There’s no way this sex could ever be hot or fun or adventurous in the slightest because we’re killing it with communication.” I would counter that and say that safety is merely the foundation. You’re allowed to have the contextual sense of risk or novelty or adventure in that safe container. Ken: Beautiful. Jordan: It’s not that when you’re with a partner you’ve been with for months or years, you have to ask for explicit consent before you go to hold their hand. We’re not saying take this to the nth degree, just that especially in the context of early dating and the new relationship where there’s potential, that I think that are overly communicating so that you can both surrender and drop into it that much more is imperative upfront.

The Most Significant Front-Of-Mind Theme

Ken: This is wonderful. This is great. Jordan, I would like to give you some time as we move toward closing just to preach, just to say whatever it is that you want to say, whatever feels important to you, whatever you want to share, based on everything we’ve talked about. I’d like to just give you some time to do that. Jordan: I think the most significant front-of-mind theme for me right now is really just allowing yourself to have the deepest, most fulfilling, most nourishing love relationship of your dreams. I think that it is very easy to get caught up, especially in our North American culture of this kind of hyper-individualistic, be all that you can be, “I don’t need no man” culture that says, “You are a successful adequate human when you are contributing to the GDP and you need people as little as possible and you’re just this autonomous island of a person.” I think that we’ve really veered off of that path of allowing ourselves to even admit or acknowledge that we are a social species and we need each other to thrive and the breakdown of greater community is I think one of the greatest travesties over the last 100 years of human history and “you are allowed to want” relationship. I think that a message a lot of people need to hear is the amount of intimacy, connection, physical touch that you know that you deeply want and crave is not a failing. It is not a bug in your software. It is the most intelligent and correct part of you.

How to Connect With Jordan Gray

Jordan: You’re allowed to just be a soft-bodied human mammal and have social connecting needs. It is not incorrect. It is the most correct. Ken: So beautiful, so beautiful. Jordan, thank you so much. What a joy to have you on. Jordan: Thank you so much, Ken. I appreciate you having me on. This is fun. Ken: I’d like you to tell people, I think a lot of people are intrigued and interested and inspired – by your vision, by how you talk, how you think and what you teach. Could you tell people more about how they could learn about you, get in touch with you, take part in your projects, etcetera? Jordan: Absolutely, the main hub where everything branches off from is my website, jordangrayconsulting.com. There’s one-on-one coaching. There are video courses for men and women. There are over 500 free blog articles, there’s a lot of resources and my books that can be found on that website. Ken: That’s Jordan Gray. Could you spell that for us? Jordan: Sure. J-O-R-D-A-N-G-R-A-Y, consulting.com. Ken: Beautiful. Thank you. Any last closing words that you have for this community of listeners, Jordan?

Final Words on Authentic Intimacy

Jordan: Date courageously. Be honest about the deepest truths of who you are and deploy patience in finding your lifelong love. The wait is worth it.

Ken: So beautiful. It’s a joy to have you on. I feel inspired toward greater athleticism in my own authenticity, very inspired. Thank you so much for that. Thank you, everyone, for listening. You can find a complete transcript of this episode at deeperdatingpodcast.com. You can also join my mailing list there. Thank you, Jordan, once again. Jordan: Thank you, Ken. I appreciate it. Ken: Thank you, everyone, for listening and I’ll see you next week on the next Deeper Dating Podcast.

There’s a powerful and easy-to-use way to shift your “field” to attract more intimacy–and I’ll teach it to you in this episode. This one process will help draw people who are right for you–and help you spot the people who aren’t. Moreover, it will help you notice the small and large invitations to love in your day-to-day life. Hop in to learn more!

Table of Contents

• How to Attract More Intimacy
• The Place of Profound Loneliness Does Not Attract More Intimacy
• Your Magic Leads You to Attract More Intimacy
• Scooching Closer to Your Being

Episode Introduction: Attract More Intimacy

There’s a simple but powerful shift that you can do that will make you more available to intimacy, almost immediately. Stay tuned to this episode of The Deeper Dating Podcast to learn this practice. Hello everybody and welcome to the Deeper Dating Podcast. I’m your host Ken Page, I’m a psychotherapist and the author of the book Deeper Dating. And today I’m going to teach you a simple practice you can do that will almost immediately invite more intimacy into your life. This week and every week I’m going to share with you the greatest tools I know to help you find love and keep it flourishing. And heal your life in the process because the skills of dating are nothing more than the skills of intimacy. And if you want to learn more about the Deeper Dating approach to intimacy, just go to deeperdatingpodcast.com, and there you’ll find a transcript of this episode. And if you join my mailing list, you’ll get free gifts and the opportunity to learn so much more about this authenticity based approach to finding love. I also want to say that everything that I talk about in this podcast is educational in nature, it’s not medical or psychiatric advice.

Subscribe and Leave Ken a Review

Finally, I just want to say that if you subscribe, leave me a review, share your thoughts and feelings or go to the website and just click on ask Ken and leave me a question. All of those are ways to interact and to support this podcast. So let’s jump in. In our lives, we have experience after experience – ways that we relate things that we see, things that we smell, things that we taste, interactions that we have, feelings that we have, physiological experiences and those are our experiences. But then there’s an overlay that follows those experiences and that overlay is the way we understand or ascribe meaning to that event. That overlay hugely depends on the state of mind that we’re in. So if we’re in a stressed-out kind of state and something happens that is a little bit awkward or maybe we have some trauma around this, we interpret that event in a way that maybe scares us or gives us some dread or some concern. If we’re really busy and really rushed, there are a million things that we miss because we’re just focusing on whatever it is that we have to get done. Or it may be that something we ascribe an erotic quality to it or we ascribe a feeling of love to it or it evokes a memory. And there’s this kind of process that happens of experience and then overlay. That overlay determines kind of how we view life and interpret life and understand life. By shifting our state of mind, we shift the overlay that we put on the events in our lives and God knows that includes the events that happen in our relationships.

How to Attract More Intimacy

So in this episode I’m going to offer you a practice that will help you make a shift so that you are in what I call the gift zone. And in that zone you interpret things in a way that invites intimacy, and leads to intimacy. Intimacy with yourself, spiritual intimacy, intimacy with others, intimacy with the world.

When we’re in that state, the state that I call the gift zone, we invite intimacy. It’s a very alive and very kind of raw and true and beautiful state that most of us, unless we’re really upset, unless we’re really anxious, unless we’re really stressed, it’s not that hard to drop into that space. And when we do, we see the world differently.

So what is this gift zone and how can we get there? I’ll just share a story. Someone who was in one of my intensive courses doing this work, learning how to go into the gift zone, how to lead with and acknowledge her core gifts. She said, “This dating thing is more like a living thing. I’m living as a soul, skin to skin, soul to soul with the world and it’s so different and so promising.” And that did lead her, at least in part, all the things that she was doing led her to a wonderful relationship.

Setting the Stage for Success

I’m not saying that the minute that you do this, you’ll instantly be in a wonderful relationship. You can’t make that promise, life unfolds in its own way but I can pretty much promise that the more you live in your gift zone, the more you will invite love, the more you will have access to creativity, the more you will be permeable to the winds of inspiration that are moving through your life. Here’s what I would like you to do to kind of help set the stage for this process. I’d like you to imagine a target and if you’ve been in any of my courses or read my book you know about this concept but follow with me anyway because you’re going to get to have an experience with it in this episode. So picture a target, really simple target and picture that the center of the target is the beating heart of your humanity. It’s the place where you are living kind of purely from your heart and from your experience. It doesn’t mean it’s always happy and pretty in pink and joyful. No, it could be sad, it could be poignant, it could be aching, but it’s alive and it’s you at the moment.

It’s the truth of who you are. It’s the beating heart of your humanity. And the closer we get to the beating heart of our humanity at any given moment, the closer we are to insight, to potential inspiration, unequivocally to transformation and to kind of our personal evolution, to finding the language of our own experience in the world and to intimacy, to love, including our longing for love.

Living in the Heart of Our Humanity Attracts More Intimacy

So it’s not easy to live in the beating heart of our humanity. It’s glorious and it radiates. The more skilled we become at living there, the more beautiful we become, the more our absolute being becomes an invitation to intimacy. And really things happen when we do that. I say that our field changes and it really does. So we want to live there, in the heart of our gift zone, the beating heart of our humanity. It’s this kind of thing that we’ve heard again and again. In dating, it’s kind of the grandmother who would say this, “Honey, just be yourself. Just be yourself.” And that’s sweet and it’s really essentially true but “just be yourself” is not just. Our self is big, our self is mysterious, our self has a language of experience and meaning that is vast and incredible. Just be yourself is no just at all. It takes a lot of work, and a lot of grace and a lot of care, and a lot of learning, but it’s the place to live. So, that’s what we want to do. We want to be able to live in our gift zone and I’m going to teach a practice for that but I’m going to finish explaining the target first. So then as you move out from that bull’s-eye place, as you move out further along the target, you enter into the land of your protections, the land of numbness, the land of your defenses. So the first zone outside of that, we could say that next band on the target, a big band is the zone of protection.

The Place of Profound Loneliness Does Not Attract More Intimacy

When we’re at the bullseye of self, which is hard to live in and hard to bear, we’re right at the core of our truth. The further out we move in that round space, that first inner circle, the closer we are toward the state of protection, the more we’re defended and in the state of protection in its kind of lighter forms, we’re avoiding things, we’re watching TV, we’re getting lost in our phone. We’re numbing ourselves in different ways, we’re kind of doing things not to be in the beating heart of our immediate humanity. The further out we get, the more defended and protected we are. So just picture this target that the further out you get from the core of your being, the more you’re defensive and the further out you get, the more you will be brittle, the more you will feel that your defenses are necessary for your survival.

They become our armor that we live by and live through and live in, and they become a habit. The further out you get when you get out to the end of the zone of protection, then you enter into the zone of disconnection and that’s the place where it’s so empty, it’s dark, it hurts.

This is a place of addiction, this is a place of really profound loneliness. It’s a hard place to be. It’s a place where we are so isolated from the warmth that lives in the center of our being, that our very existence hurts because we’re not connected to it.

Shifting Your State of Mind Leads You to a Place Where You Attract More Intimacy

So all of us have lived in all parts of this target, but the goal and the journey is drop by homeopathic drop to move closer to the gift zone. And by living in the gift zone, you shift your state of mind to a place where you attract more intimacy, where you radiate more intimacy, where you radiate more authenticity. So you’re actually radiating messages of who you truly and authentically are. So, that people who are looking for someone, like who you truly and authentically are, will recognize you, will see you, will hear you, will pick that up because our romantic sensors are incredibly, incredibly, exquisitely refined. And when you’re in that zone, that’s where the magic, the depth of inner experience, the richness, the sense of expansion, the fullness, the tenderness, that’s when these beautiful, beautiful experiences blossom. When we follow those experiences, they blossom inside us and they lead us into a fuller sense of self and a fuller expression. But they also lead us to more risk because of course there is a risk, an existential risk with being real. There are lots of risks. There’s the risk of being real and what the repercussions of that are going to be. There’s the risk of people being hurt. There’s the risk of people being intimidated. There’s the risk of people being jealous. There’s the risk of rejection. And then there’s the risk of the feelings of power and expansion that might trigger feelings of guilt or shame or I don’t deserve this or I don’t know how to handle this.

The Risk of Living in the Zone of Authenticity

There’s the risk of feeling the sadness, the grieving, the trauma, the different human experiences that live in this zone of authenticity. But when you’re in your gift zone, you feel your core essential gifts. You attract intimacy and you invite intimacy. And your overlay of the experiences that you have in your day to day life when you’re in your gift zone becomes an overlay of noticing love and noticing the invitations to love in your life. So this is where I’m going to teach a process now what I call the intimacy fix. And it is really simple process, it’s a self-regulating, self inspiring, self-determined process. And here’s what it is. What you do is you just imagine this target, you just notice where you are. You just think, well, where am I now in this target? Let’s say it’s a kind of just a general day to day moment and you think, well, I don’t know, I’m nowhere, I’m not noticing this target. I’m not noticing my feelings. You drop down a little bit more and you say, “Oh, oh, oh, actually I’m kind of on the edge of some feelings here, a peaceful feeling or a sad feeling.” And then you recognize how much you are in touch with the beating heart of your humanity and you try to hold that space with compassion. The minute you can feel your humanity and hold it with the feeling of compassion, you are in magic land, in some way, and you are affecting the shape of your future just by living that way, just by being that way. That’s the magic of your being.

Your Magic Leads You to Attract More Intimacy

That’s your magic and it’s real and it’s true and it leads to love and it invites love. Or maybe you’re with someone you care about and you’re pissed off, or you’re irritated, or you’re stressed, or you’re just disconnected, and you say, “Wow, well, I’m pissed off. I’m irritated. This person who I love, I’m not feeling the love at this point. I’m just feeling annoyed, I’m feeling denigrating of them, I’m feeling denigrating of myself. I just feel like shit.” And then you notice that and you feel the pain. You feel whatever it is that you are. And then you think, “what can I do at this moment to move more into my gift zone?” So if I’m in pain about something that’s going on and I don’t take care of myself, I’m not going to enter into my gift zone. If I’m in pain and I don’t do something to create healing or communication, I won’t move more into my gift zone. Here’s a tiny segue. This is something I tell people all the time. If you’re stuck in a bad place, in a relational situation or even not in a relational situation, in any kind of situation, if you’re stuck in a bad place and you decide that you want to try to get out of it yourself,try – try once, try twice, and then kind of give up and instead ask for help from someone you trust. The results will be so much more dramatically quick and effective because we can’t lift ourselves up by our bootstraps, we come down immediately.

The Weakest Tool in the Box

But we keep thinking, “Oh my gosh, I can figure this out by willpower,” but willpower is one of the weakest tools in the box. So when we’re in pain, reaching out for help, talking about our pain, expressing what our need is with a safe person is a glorious, glorious way to move into our gift zone with that person. That’s an act of bravery. Here’s another example, you’re walking down the street thinking of whatever and you’re not in your gift zone, you’re not in a bad place, you’re just walking down the street and you think, let me go into my gift zone, let me just move just a little bit more toward the center of that target. Can I do that? Can I just shift a little bit to stand more in the center of the target? So then you do that, you make that shift, you begin to feel your humanity. Maybe you feel sad. Maybe you realize something is worrying you. Maybe all of a sudden you can look up and say, it’s a beautiful day and I wasn’t even noticing it. All of those experiences are fine and often when we are about to move into our gift zone, when we’re about to do this conscious practice of moving into our amazing, awesome gift zone, there’s a ring of fire we go through. Maybe it’s shame. For me, it’s sadness. When I’m out of my gift zone, it’s often because I don’t want to feel certain sadnesses that is in my heart.

Moving Closer to Your Humanity Will Attract More Intimacy

So when I’m stepping into my gifts zone, often there’s going to be sadness, there will be anxiety because those are things that I experience, of things that are not taken care of, that are not done and I can get lost in those. Or I could say, these are the things that I feel on the way to the gift zone, on the way to the beating heart of my humanity. And then I say, “Oh yeah, that sadness. I know that is sadness.” It’s a part of who I am. When I hold the sadness in that way, I’m in my gift zone. When I hold my anxiety in that way, with that little bit of more spaciousness, more compassion, and more acceptance, there’s more breathing room, that’s a gift zone space of handling a problem. So, there I am walking down the street and I do this shift and I just think, “how can I move a little bit more into my humanity?” Now if you’re stressed, you might not be able to do this or if you’re seriously anxious or depressed or worried. But the other times you probably will be able to do it. And why not, let’s try it right now. Just take a minute and just think, “where am I on this target?” And if you’re anywhere near the beating heart of your humanity, celebrate, enjoy that, feel the glow, feel the warmth. Don’t even worry about it, just allow yourself the pleasure of that experience. Shoulder to shoulder, just shoulders touching with that gift zone place, with that intimacy with self, that’s enough, that’s all you need.

Scooching Closer to Your Being

If you’re not feeling that, ask yourself, how could I kind of scooch over a little bit closer to the heart of my being? Maybe it’s an action, maybe you need a walk, maybe you need a nap, maybe it’s time to read, maybe it’s time for something else. But you can ask yourself this question and every time you make the conscious shift to go into your gift zone, you’re living love and you are inviting love. And this is the other thing, it feels like an inside thing, but it affects your field, it affects the things that happen. When you live that way, there is an effulgence, there’s some kind of radiating of something that I don’t know how it works, but it does draw love. Also, you are at your most beautiful at those times. There’s a way that you are lit from within, even in sadness when you’re in your gift zone.

Conclusion

So this is a beautiful practice that you could do at any time you want and it will make you more beautiful. It will make you radiate the beauty of your being more. It will affect the amount of love in your life because the overlay that you’ll be adding to your experiences will be an overlay that invites and appreciates and notices love that much more. So I hope you enjoyed this exercise. You can go to Deeper Dating Podcast and click on ask Ken at the top and just share your experiences so that I could share them as well with this community. Enjoy this process, it’s gorgeous, it’s you and it’s fun. So, I look forward to seeing you on the next episode of the Deeper Dating Podcast.

Sex in early dating: When is too soon? When is too long? (And is there really a “too soon” and “too long?”) In this episode we’ll look at the signs that it’s not the right time to have sex–and signs that it is the right time. We’ll explore the three essential ingredients to cultivate a soulful, erotically wonderful, emotionally safe connection with someone we’re dating.

Table of Contents

• Instances When Having Sex in Early Dating Ruins the Chance of a Relationship
• Don’t Jump Into Early Dating Sex When You Don’t Feel Safe
• Three Questions to Ask Before Engaging in Early Dating Sex
• Stay With People Who Can Honor Your Space in Early Dating

Episode Introduction: Early Dating

When should you start having sex in early dating? When is too early? When have you waited too long and lost an opportunity for erotic connection? Stay tuned to this episode of the Deeper Dating podcast to learn more. Hello everybody and welcome to the Deeper Dating podcast. I’m Ken Page and I’m a psychotherapist, the author of the book Deeper Dating and the host of this podcast. And today, we’re going to be talking about sex in early dating. Every week, I’m going to share with you the greatest tools that I know to help you find love and keep it flourishing and heal your life in the process because the skills of dating are nothing more than the skills of love. And the skills of love are the greatest skills of all for a happy and rich and meaningful life. And if you want to learn more about the deeper dating path to real intimacy, just go to DeeperDatingpodcast.com. And if you sign up for my mailing list you’ll get free gifts and you’ll learn a lot about the ideas that I teach and learn a lot about other resources that I really believe in. You’ll also find complete transcripts of this and every other episode.

Subscribe and Leave Ken a Review

I also want to say everything in this podcast is educational in nature. It’s not medical or psychiatric advice. And finally, if you like what you’re learning here it would be a wonderful thank you if you could subscribe and leave a review or a comment. So thank you so much to everyone who’s done that already. So let’s jump in. We are going to talk about sex today. I want to talk about something that I think is so important for so many daters which is, “what’s too early to have sex?” What’s waiting too long to have sex? And how do I know what the right time is to have sex in early dating? So I come from the gay men’s party culture. I came up in like the 80’s and the 90’s and sex was just what you had as quick as you could. And then that was fun and then you would look for a relationship out of that. For some people that worked really well. For me, it worked horribly. Yes, I had a lot of sex and a lot of that sex was really fun but there was an emptiness and loneliness in that whole period for me because it just wasn’t the way I was really built to operate. So by the time I met my husband I had learned a lot and he teases me to this day about how long we had to wait to really have sex. So to deny your Eros, to not let it grow and develop is not a good thing and that holds back the vulnerability that happens when you show and express sexual interest to somebody.

Instances When Having Sex in Early Dating Ruins the Chance of a Relationship

It’s a very, very beautiful thing when that’s mutual. But to have sex too quickly often ruins the chance of a relationship, and why? So many different reasons. One reason is that sex without enough intimacy is like miracle grow for our fear of intimacy.

If you have sex before you feel really emotionally safe, if you have sex before there’s a sense of deep intimacy with someone or growing intimacy with them, the chances are great that after that sex you’re either going to want to leave, stay away, go back to the thrill of the hunt or you’ll get needy and you’ll get clingy and you’ll start imagining and projecting a kind of deeper love that it may not be time for, or that may not even be right in this relationship.

Now, can it happen that early-on sex can be great and then a relationship could begin? Absolutely, and all of us are built differently and all of us have to think about this for ourselves. But I want to share some thoughts about when I think it’s really not so good to have sex yet. But just to say first, the context that I’m speaking about this in is not recreational sex. The context I’m speaking about this in is the context of someone who really would like a real soulful, healthy, connected relationship. And if that’s your goal, then I think these ideas will apply to you more fully. Here are some times that I think in early dating it’s best not to jump into sex. Early dating – don’t have sex when you’re high, don’t have sex when you’re intoxicated.

When the Connection Is Not Ripe

Because especially in early dating, if you do, there’s a sense of discrimination that you lose. There’s a way that you miss the subtleties of what feels right and what doesn’t feel right. Often that’s why we get intoxicated because we don’t want to feel the ways in which a connection doesn’t feel right yet, isn’t ripe yet, hasn’t grown enough yet. Our fears and our insecurities are still big because this person is still a stranger to us and so we get high, we drink to kind of get over that and it works. We do get over that but we lose so much discrimination in the process. So I do recommend that early on in a relationship it is best not to be intoxicated before making the decision of whether or not you’re going to have sex. Don’t have sex if you don’t feel safe with the person and safe is completely subjective. It’s how you feel inside. Even if you tell yourself your reasons for not feeling safe are silly or not valid, if you don’t feel safe, don’t jump into sex. Now with a really wonderful person, if you don’t feel safe you might be able to share with them why you don’t feel safe or what you need instead. So many people early on just say, “I want to start out by being held. I want to start out by just making out. Let’s keep our tops on. Let’s keep our bottoms on.”

A Huge Early Dating Red Flag

Whatever it is for you that will help you feel safe and again it’s completely subjective and no matter what it is it’s valid. Because if you don’t feel safe and you jump into sex early in a relationship it’s going to bite you in the butt. It’s somehow going to hurt. It’s going to hurt the relationship, it’s going to hurt you, it’s going to hurt your self-esteem. The feeling of safety must, must, must be honored. Another thing that goes with that is, don’t have early sex because you feel pressured. In fact, if the person you’re with is pressuring you to have sex before you are ready, that is a huge red flag. A huge red flag. It is not a good sign. If you let the person know that you’re not ready and they can’t honor that, that’s a major red flag and a good, good, good chance that that’s someone to stay away from. So this is really a big one. You want to watch for the tendency to have sex because you’re trying to make the person more into you. You know that you’re really good in bed and they’re going to like you more so it would be a good idea to have sex. Or you know that it might make them want you more. Or maybe you somehow are kind of clicking their sense of desire in such a way that you’re going to get them more into you. These are not good ideas. Those are in fact the opposite of self-love when we do that.

Don’t Jump Into Sex During Early Dating When You Don’t Feel Safe

And another one that connects with all of this is that if the person you’re with is pressuring you or wants you to have sex that doesn’t feel safe to you, because of COVID times, because of STDs, because of whatever, if you don’t feel safe in the way the sex is being had, that must be honored. Again, if the person you’re with can’t honor that, major problem right off the bat, it’s really, really true. Eyes wide open. The other thing here is that sex is a spectrum.

Sex is not just obviously intercourse. There’s so much in the realm of sex.

There could be holding hands. I remember speaking to someone who had come from a history of sex addiction. This person said to me that he was in recovery and he said to me that he was dating somebody and he said, “We held hands in the movies.” And he said, “When I think of all the sex I had, the feeling I had just holding hands was like a gourmet meal and all of the other stuff, no matter how wild and crazy and whatever it was, was like McDonald’s. Just holding hands was so sexually gorgeous.” And I remember someone else talking about being with his wife and they were shopping for kitchen appliances together and there was such a sense of love at that moment between the two of them that he said this was sex, shopping for kitchen appliances together was sex. “I was so aroused. It was so suffused with turn-on because we were so beautiful together.” So there are so many kinds of sex.

Deeper Turn-On of Intimate Moments in Early Dating

And in early relating, if you can have the kind of sexual connection which involves holding hands, which involves touching, which involves expressing what turns you on or what you’ll want to do in the future, if you allow yourself to get into that deeper turn-on of intimate moments, you can have the richest sexual relationship pre-intercourse. This is a wonderful, wonderful way to nourish and grow the tendrils of erotic desire with someone you really like. Another way is fantasy. Let’s say you’re not up to the point yet where you’re going to have full-on sex. How rich it is to just fantasize, to sexually fantasize, about the parts of their body you like or love or imagine or picture or what you would like to do with them or what you would like to do with those parts or what you would like them to do with you. These kinds of rich, rich building of this suffusion of Eros is a glorious, glorious way to build a connection. And as we know, when we’ve got that erotic richness combined with the sense of the goodness of the connection and the goodness of the other human being, that is ecstasy. That is joy. That is the only place we want to be if we’re really looking for a truly healthy, romantic relationship. Here’s another really interesting thing is that sometimes a relationship begins and it becomes sexual, it’s really good, it’s fine, and then all of a sudden you feel yourself falling in love in a deeper way. Where you feel the two of you having that happen.

Falling in Love in a Deeper Way

And all of a sudden you don’t want to have sex any more and you wonder what is wrong with me? What happened? Is this like this total fear of intimacy thing? And this is something I’ve seen happen to a lot of people and this happened to me too. Well, what it is, I think, is that there’s dropping down into a deeper level of connection and the psyche has to re-calibrate to the vulnerability, to that rewiring where love and connection meet eros in a deeper way and there’s a pocket of needing to wait or needing to stop.

So if you find that at a point when you’re falling in love in a deeper way and there’s this pocket where it feels eros disappears, honor that.

Go with it, give it space, but watch because little by little you will see and feel the tendrils of eros growing newer and stronger and fresher and differently than they had before. And these are the things that we want to have happen. Hollywood and porn and so much literature teaches us that real love begins with this giant boom and stays that way and if it’s anything less, A – we have intimacy problems or , B – the person is not right for us. But sex is so deep and love is so deep and so profound that we can’t really get our arms around it and it’s going to surprise us. And the ways that it surprises us are part of the mystery of our own love life.

The Madonna-Whore Complex

Why all of a sudden am I feeling all of this? Why all of a sudden have I stopped feeling all of this? Why all of a sudden have my feelings changed? Why are they evolving in the ways that they are? And that’s where we need to listen for our own heart language, our own sexual language because sex, like love, like life, like creativity is so much richer, so much deeper, so much more original, so much more tender, so much more wild than we give it credit for. Sigmund Freud coined the phrase Madonna-whore complex. He described this painful but familiar kind of state where sex and intimacy, deep sex, and deep intimacy cannot coexist. Lustful, lustful, wild, horny sex and spiritual, emotional intimacy can’t coexist. This is how he said it, of course, speaking about only men, “Where such men love, they have no desire and where they desire, they cannot love.” And what I wrote in my book, Deeper Dating, is in relation to both the word Madonna and the word whore, my response is the same. You say that like it’s a bad thing. Well, it’s not. So as we grow in a healthy new relationship, we feel both of those things. We feel wild and horny and dirty, in the most dirty, I mean in a great sexual way, in really wonderful ways. We also feel a soulful connection, a space that is above just sex, above just horniness. It’s spiritual. It’s deep. And the two together are the most amazing thing. But we do need to give that time for those circuitries to grow.

Three Questions to Ask Before Engaging in Sex While on Early Dating

We do that by not having sex too quick, but by cultivating the beauty of the sexual connection and the emotional connection. Because you could be having sex with someone and it could be really good and really hot and exciting but then you look into their eyes and if you feel love and they feel love and you see that, it completely changes the experience. It completely up levels it. And maybe you feel like you would have been fine just doing it the other way but then you experience this and you say, “Oh my God, this is what I was looking for.” And there’s a feeling of safety and a home in that kind of sex that is combined with excitement and turn on that is just, as I said, so amazing. So three questions that we can ask ourselves as our sexual relationship with someone begins and in a future episode I’m going to use these ideas to talk about how we can discover our sexual and romantic core gifts. So the questions are these, “Do I feel safe?”, as we talked about huge question? That’s the foundation. That’s the ground of being able to get to these other spaces. Because if you don’t feel safe, something has to be adjusted, something has to be fixed, something has to be changed. Or you need not be having sex with that person or you need not be having sex with that person at this time. So safety is again so profoundly important and really want to encourage you to give yourself the space to say, “Do I feel safe?”

What Moves You in Sex?

If in a general way you feel safe with someone, the next breakdown of that question is, “What do I feel safe doing right now?” And then that’s what you give yourself the space to do. If you’re with someone who allows that and you’re giving that gift of dignity to yourself and then you do whatever that is that feels safe to do and you both do it with full heart, who cares about intercourse? Well, I mean everyone to some degree cares about intercourse but in another way it really doesn’t matter. Because there’s such a joy in that state that it’s worth everything. So the second one is, “what moves you in sex?” What touches your heart? What makes you feel moved and touched and inspired? What makes you feel love? What makes you feel seen? What makes you feel that somehow the way your partner is being with you and the way that you’re being with your partner allows for access to those deeper states of emotional connectedness? And the third question is, “what really turns you on?” And that’s a question that we really have to think about sometimes. And I’m going to describe two different ways that I think there’s work that needs to be done for each of us in our own sexual user’s manual and our own sexual self-discovery. So one is, “what really is exciting to me?” What pacing really is deeply exciting to me? And here we got to leave the realm of what’s expected and what’s normal.

Assessing When the Pacing Is Too Fast or Too Slow in Early Dating

You might feel like my pacing is too slow. You might feel like, “Oh, my pacing is too fast and too wild and it’s not appropriate.” but between us and us, we need to acknowledge what really turns us on. It’s an act of bravery and it’s a gift. And I want to say that for so many people, there are two things that scare us about what turns us on. One is that what turns us on sexually is too vulnerable, is too tender, is too soft, is too unathletic, too un-pyrotechnical, too simple because of everything we hear about what sex is supposed to look like. The other is that what really turns us on is too wild or too kinky or too crazy but it’s an act of beautiful self-discovery to admit these things to ourselves. I’m talking about things that are safe and I’m talking about things that are consensual and I’m talking about things between two adults. So given that there are probably whatever your things are that turn you deeply on, there are so many people who would find those things, the cat’s meow and would experience them as a gift. My friend David Schecter, who is a playwright and a lyricist said something really wonderful to me once. He said he thinks he has a different understanding of the word perverse. He said perverse means per verse like through poetry. Whatever it is that we are most turned on by, be it very tender, very vanilla, very wild, very crazy is a poetry of our being. It’s a language of a deep inner self that gets expressed through our sexuality. And I love that concept of what perverse actually means.

A Compulsive Relationship With Sexuality

So one last thought that I want to share is for people who have had a history of some degree of sexual compulsion where they have used sex as a way to get love, they have been in a compulsive relationship with their sexuality, their sexuality has been mixed in with a lot of drinking or a lot of drug use, and I think that’s a big portion of the population who has struggled with something like that, if not the great majority. So that adds in another dimension and the dimension is when are we being triggered? It’s like if you think of the image of taking a mound of jello and pouring hot water on it. That hot water is going to create a groove in the jello and that groove is going to get deeper and deeper and deeper so that if water is then poured on the jello it’s always going to go down that same canal. That’s what it’s like with our sexual wiring, so there’s rewiring that needs to happen. We may feel really turned on, really connected, but it may be compulsion. And we will, through our work on our own growth, either in a recovery program or with other kinds of help and support recognize the times that our sexual expression as right as it may feel is really not so right and is leading us to not such a good place. Does this complicate things? Yes, it does. But all of us, like we need to rewire in our intimacy journey, we also need to rewire in better ways in our sex lives, in our sexuality, in our sexual expression. And that’s true in very particular ways in early dating.

Stay With People Who Can Honor Your Space in Early Dating

So as you take these ideas and live them in early dating and only, only, only stay with people who can honor them as well and honor the space for that as well. As you do that, you will be rewiring, rewiring in such a way that your healthiest self, your hottest, most erotic self, and your most deeply loving self will all be able to rejoin together and that’s really what we want. So thanks so much for listening to this episode. And you can get a transcript and join my mailing list by going to DeeperDatingpodcast.com and I’d love to have you as part of this learning community for this and all of the other projects that I’m working on. So thank you so much and I’ll see you on the next episode of the Deeper Dating podcast.

Julie and Yue are smart, caring and intrepid explorers of the landscape of today’s dating world. In this episode, they share their most moving dating stories, their best advice, and the most essential challenges facing daters today. This was an incredible conversation – I hope you enjoy it!

Episode Table of Contents

• A Virtual Walk-Through to a Museum of Ideas With the Dateable Podcast Hosts
• Crossing the Tripwires of Taboo
• The Dateable Podcast Shares the Biggest Challenge That People Face
• The Dateable Podcast Recommends Taking an Extra Step of Vulnerability
• Looking Through a Lens of Building Partnership
• The Dateable Podcast Reveals Why Dating Is Not a Numbers Game
• The Dateable Podcast Explores the Private World of Sex
• Favorite Episodes From the Dateable Podcast
• How the Dateable Podcast Has Evolved Over the Last Four Years

Episode Introduction: Dateable Podcast

Yue Xu and Julie Krafchick are the hosts of the Dateable Podcast, one of the top podcasts on love, sex, and dating. And in this episode, they’re going to reflect on the most important insights, the most notable trends, and the most memorable stories from their years of thoughtful work, right in the trenches of modern dating. Stay tuned to this episode of the Deeper Dating Podcast. Hi, I’m Ken Page. Welcome to Deeper Dating. Today, I’m going to talk about why the number of single people keeps growing even with the wild proliferation of new ways to meet. I’m gonna talk about why so much dating advice actually stirs us away from healthy love instead of toward it. And I’m gonna talk about four keys to the wiser path to love. Four changes that you can make that will profoundly affect your ability to find and keep healthy love. And you can read more about this at our show notes at deeperdatingpodcast.com Ken: So Yue and Julie of the Dateable Podcast. I’m so thrilled to have you here. Yue: Thanks for having us, Ken. Julie: Yeah. We’re excited, too. Ken: I was on one of your earlier episodes in Season Nine and had a really good time there. I just love what you do. I love the intelligence, the thoughtfulness, the edginess, the kind of curiosity, the spirit of curiosity that you enter into this with, and all of the amazing stories and ideas and insights and thoughts that get generated on your podcast. Julie: Thank you. People loved your episode, too. It was definitely one of our crowd favorites.

A Virtual Walk-Through to a Museum of Ideas With the Dateable Podcast Hosts

Yue: We definitely have mutual love with you. I just want to promote you for one quick second. You were on Season Nine, Episode Six in an episode called Deeper Dating with Ken Page. For anyone interested, Ken Page is amazing. Julie: People saying like, “That was the most enlightened conversation I’ve heard in a while.” It was awesome. Ken: That makes me feel great. That makes me feel great. I’m so excited to dive in today because I feel like there’s this social distancing resource available now, which was probably available before but it’s visiting museums all over the world via the internet. Ken: I feel like in your years of curating the most amazing episodes and hearing so many stories from the frontline of dating and then working with them in thoughtful ways, tips, inside stories, that it’s like almost like a virtual walk-through a museum of ideas that are really important. Ken: So I am thrilled to walk down the halls of this museum with you and I have a whole bunch of questions that I think can highlight some of those things. Yue: I love that visual. I’m just thinking about walking through a museum about dating and seeing all the artifacts of the ways people used to date back in the day. Julie: Pre-COVID-19. Ken: Right. It’s true. It’s true. I remember Marianne Williamson was giving a talk once and she said that she was in a museum and she was looking at a painting of St. Sebastian with all these arrows through his body. She said, like, “What does this represent? What’s the artist trying to capture?”

The Dateable Podcast Hosts Introduce Zumping

Ken: Then she just said, “I get it. It’s dating.” I’d love to hear from each of you, well, I have a whole bunch of different questions but here’s one question that I want to ask is what is standing out for people that you talk to these days the most? Yue: These days as in the time of Coronavirus, Ken? Or these days as in 2020? Ken: Both good questions. I guess the answers would be really different so let’s go with both. Yue: With both? Julie: You can do pre, post world. Yue: That’s really good. I really believe that when it comes to modern dating, this is with or without Coronavirus, that I think there are a lot of blurred gender lines which is one of the main themes that we’ve been seeing. And because of the blurred gender lines, I think there’s been a lot of confusion on what is expected of your potential suitors. Yue: That’s what creates a lot of the miscommunication or even these dating terms that keep coming up like ghosting and breadcrumbing. But today, we learned a new dating term called zumping which is dumping over Zoom. Ken: Oh my God. The first time you heard it, folks. First time I heard it. Julie: We had a debate on our Facebook group. It’s like, “Is it better to be zumped or ghosted?” I think overall they decided zumped is better. Especially with Coronavirus, you’re not left hanging if someone is ill or something like that. It’s just clear that they do not want to be with you. Ken Paige: Oh, good point.

Modern Dating

Yue: Julie, I’m sure you have a lot of the learnings too for just modern dating in general. Julie: Yes. I think before maybe let’s stick with the pre-Coronavirus theme first and then we’ll both go into post. I think the biggest thing that stands out for me is that anything goes this day and age. I think in past generations, there was a very clear path that people took. It was like, find a relationship that’s monogamous, get married, have children. Julie: There was one linear path for the majority. I think what’s been happening in modern dating is that we are given the ability to create the relationships we want and people are really starting to question a lot of those norms especially because our generation is the byproduct of divorce. Julie: I think we’ve seen relationships that haven’t gone well under that pre-notion of it must go a certain way. So people have been really exploring different avenues, whether that’s like polyamory or being pansexual, or whatever it might be, it’s really people are not afraid to go out and experiment. Julie: I think that’s actually something that’s really wonderful about our generation. But also it’s a challenge because I think there’s just so many options and sometimes people get confused. It’s actually not a bad thing if you’re confused because we’ve seen people on our podcast that are like, “Okay. I haven’t had a great …” Julie: There’s one woman that’s standing out for me, that’s like, “I haven’t had great experiences with men. I’m going to try dating a couple. I’m going to try opening my bumble to women and just see what happens.”

Crossing the Tripwires of Taboo

Julie: She actually found love with a woman and explored other sides of herself and then realized full circle that she actually really was attracted to men. I think that that could sound confused to some people but I think it’s really just getting the space to explore yourself and modern dating allows us to do that. Ken: So interesting. The things that each of you said really are connected because you’re kind of crossing these tripwires of taboo and entering into a new space, which is both wonderful and scary and also really confusing. Yes, just thinking about both of those parts, it’s easy to get scared, right? Ken: It’s easy to want to venture into something new like, “I’m attracted to this person, I’m attracted to this situation but that doesn’t fit in with what feels like home or safe to me, but I want to go ahead with it.” Ken: But then the fear comes up, the confusion comes up. What do people tend to do with that in each of those arenas that you both describe, the shape and the form of a relationship, but also gender identity stuff? Ken: I just got to take one minute and say that I am constantly tortured by relationship teachers who say, “Men, you have to be alpha men.” Or, “Women, don’t forget your femininity. You can’t let go of your femininity, or you won’t find your alpha guy.” Just it’s agony. I think that happens less for younger folks.

The Dateable Podcast Explores a Room Full of Naked Art

Yue: I think to relate back to your museum analogy, Ken, is I think what people are feeling right now is that they’re going through a museum and they’re taking this map that their ancestors have passed, and said, “You should follow this path in this museum to get to the exit or whatever the Nirvana is.” Yue: Everyone’s ripping up these maps thinking, “Okay. I don’t want to take that path because I don’t believe that that’s where the route I should take.” But what’s it’s causing is that they don’t know where to go next, “Which room should I explore next? What art should I look at next?” Yue: What everyone’s doing is they’re just throwing themselves into rooms of art and to just see how I feel. It could be like a room full of naked art. “How does this make me feel right now?” Yue: A room full of biblical art, “How does this make me feel right now?” I think what’s happening right now, especially during time of quarantine, is that people are trying to digest and analyze how they’re feeling. Yue: I think daters, for so many years, have just try to experiment and go into these different paths. But now’s the time, their quiet time to say, “How did these rooms really make me feel? Then what is my next step?” Julie: I think that’s so dead-on because I think that is the challenge with all this, is that there’s analysis paralysis that you basically just don’t do anything.

Julie of the Dateable Podcast Says Dive in and Take the Plunge

Julie: We talked to another author that basically was saying how a lot of times people would say they want relationships, but because they weren’t in the right place financially or they hadn’t explored their career to the maximum yet or they weren’t fully the person they wanted to be or they didn’t do whatever they’re trying to get to the next level.

Julie: But the problem with that is, you’re never 100%. So it’s when do you just take the chance and dive in with someone and evolve together versus taking that time to figure it out on your own and waiting for that perfect moment that’s just never going to come?

Julie: I think that’s been the challenge for people is overcoming all these options, all the self-reflection and just making moves like we’ve talked about. The only way to really understand relationships is to get into relationships and that could be like a month relationship, a three-month relationship. Julie: It doesn’t need to be years and years. That’s the best way to really understand what you want, opposed to just getting into this decision-making mode that doesn’t go anywhere. Yue: Exactly. Ken: Yes, there’s so much in this. It’s making me think of a million things but one thing it’s making me think of is the vulnerability of the person who is in that new room already and then gets a newbie who’s frightened. Ken: It makes me think of gay men having a relationship with a newly out gay man or a gay woman. Especially if that other person comes from a religious tradition that claws at them and grabs at them in terms of guilt and all of that.

Yue of the Dateable Podcast Talks About Taking Risks in Love

Ken: I remember a gay male friend of mine, we were just hanging out in his room and he said, “Okay. I’m lying on this bed and everyone has to start out in the closet. When they’re ready to come out and make the decision to fully come out, then they could join me in bed, but not until then.” He had been so disappointed so many times. Ken: So yes, there’s a little bit of a risk for that person who’s kind of, I guess there’s really a risk for both. There’s a risk for the person taking the new step and there’s a risk for the person who’s done that already. That kind of risk is beautiful, in a way. It’s scary but it’s wonderful. Ken: And we know that risk sparks Eros. That Eros is a spark that needs to jump a gap. There’s something sexy about taking risks.

Yue: Yes, if you think about it, our approach to romance and love lives are kind of trailing behind how we approach life in general. Because I think if you look at millennials and younger generations, they are motivated to try non-traditional lifestyles, they’re motivated to not have a career and they’re motivated to not possess and own things.

Yue: Yet when it comes to their love lives, it’s a little bit delayed. I think now it’s catching up where I think people are thinking in that manner of, “Okay. How do I take risks in my love life and how do I think in a non-traditional way without imposing all these expectations from society or my ancestors,” whatever it may be.

The Dateable Podcast Shares the Biggest Challenge That People Face

Yue: I think we are getting to that tipping point of everyone wanting to make these decisions and take the risk. They just don’t know how, it’s just they’re missing the tools. Julie: I think that’s a really good point. Because I think to our conversation just a few minutes ago of like, “How much self-analysis do you do versus take action?” I don’t think it’s one or the other. I think that you do need to actually get in touch with yourself and I think there’s a mistake people make of just dating over and over again, and never taking time to self-reflect either.

Julie: We always talk about the importance of therapy and getting to the root of what you’re really looking for in life and all that. But I think you have to balance that with also being willing to be vulnerable and get hurt and take those chances.

Julie: I think that’s maybe the silver bullet is how do you get to a place that you’re feeling self-confident enough and that you don’t need a partner but you’re willing to make room for someone and really take a risk with it. Julie: Because what we see, and I think this is maybe the biggest challenge that people face, is that everyone wants to just be half in. They never want to admit that they had a great time or tell that person that this was such a great date or they really like them or whatever. They’re always just trying to play it cool. Like, “I could take it or leave it.”

The “Love Is Blind Experiment” From the Dateable Podcast

Julie: We actually just did a Love is Blind Experiment on our podcast and we saw with both of the people that ended up going on a date is they basically were like, “It was good. I would see them again. But if it doesn’t work out, I won’t be devastated.” Julie: I actually think that approach might be the most dangerous because it just puts you in this middle limbo, that you’re not taking a chance either way. Ken: I love that. Yue: We also talked about this on your episode, Ken, when we had you on. For some reason, we’re in this competition to show the least interest in the other person. Whoever shows the least interest wins somehow. That’s just baffling to me because that’s not how relationships work. Julie: I blame bad dating books for that. There was that, “Why Men Love Bitches,” or whatever that would teach you to do exactly what you just said, Yue. So I think there’s that ingrainment. Julie: Especially in people that are crossing that maybe elder millennial line of like of the new way of thinking and the old way of thinking. I think a lot of us struggle with, “Should I play these rules that I was once told where younger people are like ‘What are you guys even talking about?'” Ken: Yes and the bad part of when we do that is when we suppress our enthusiasm it turns into a frozenness or a secret neediness or more likely both. Those are not great places. Because I think that’s another thing is that, I mean, I think we all have all different kinds of circuitries of attraction.

Double Perspectives and Date Experiments From the Dateable Podcast

Ken: I know that I could be attracted to, in my past, but still, just the experience of attraction, it’s easy to be attracted on all different levels to someone who feels a little bit withholding. There’s a lot there but there’s a lot not given yet. There’s something where you want to win that person over. Ken: I know that kind of circuitry of attraction and it was where I spent many decades of hell before finding my husband. But then there’s another thing, it’s I could be deeply attracted to someone who really goes out on a limb in showing me how much he cares and how much he likes me and sexually, emotionally really gets vulnerable. That is sexy, too. It’s risky but it’s really sexy. Julie: Exactly. I think one of the things that we’ve, at least for me has been the most fascinating in our podcast is we do these, we’ve done a bunch of these date experiments where we hear two different perspectives of the date. Or just like we’ve heard couples stories or just anything that’s double perspective. Julie: I think when you’re dating, you forget that there is another person there that has a life before you. Especially if you’ve gone on one or two dates, how many hours have you really spent with this person? Four max, right? It’s like, “You have no idea what’s going on in their lives.” Julie: I think we tend to think, and I definitely was guilty of this in my 20s, and maybe even very early 30s, thinking like I was the center of the world and if they weren’t texting me back, it meant that they didn’t like me.

The Dateable Podcast Takes Us Into the World of Ghosting

Julie: I think when you play the games and you’re like, “I’m going to hold off and see if you text me,” and all that, it doesn’t actually get to the root of what’s happening in their lives and it just maybe makes this push-pull that doesn’t do anything and it doesn’t move this forward. Julie: For example, we had a past guest of ours and someone in our Facebook group saying that he got ghosted during quarantine. He just do a virtual hike date and the girl just fell off the face of the universe. My point to him was like, “Why don’t you just reach out and tell her that you were really looking forward to …” Julie: Because they had one virtual date that I guess went really well and he said it was the best connection he’s had in a long time. It’s like what is the harm in reaching out and saying like, “Hey, how are things going? I was really looking forward to this date.” Julie: Especially right now when COVID-19 is rampant, there’s so many external things happening in people’s lives. Dating might not be at the forefront for everyone right now, especially if they’re dealing with health things or family or whatever it may be. Julie: So why not give this person the benefit of the doubt and try to come from a place of understanding and putting yourself at least out there a little. What do you really have to lose at that point? Ken: Wow. I just want to take that, put it in a little, I don’t know what, a little advice pedestal that’s really big and really actionable. I know it’s really true.

The Dateable Podcast Recommends Taking an Extra Step of Vulnerability

Ken: I mean, when I met my husband, he was with his two kids, I was with my one kid. I was totally available and looking and he had his hand hands full with his girls. He blew me off on, I would say, 1.5 of our dates. Julie: Now you’re married. Right? Ken: Yes, we’re married. Yes, I gave up. I was like, “All right, I got to be the adult here. I give up.” Then one night, I woke up, bolt up right with this feeling like, “If I don’t go out of my way, I’m going to lose this opportunity.” So I did and I just think what you said is a lesson to everybody. Ken: It’s really worth it to take that extra step of vulnerability. I mean, you’re not going to keep doing it if the person’s not interested but not trying could be such a loss for just the reason you said. I just love that. Julie: I mean, right now if you’re not with them, what do you have to lose by reaching out one more time? It’s the same situation of that you’re in now. I think there is a line though. I don’t think someone should be reaching out every day after not hearing back. Julie: I think, my personal take is the one time roll. It’s the one time benefit of the doubt, let me just throw it out there, be as vulnerable as I can in just the fact of how it’s affecting me that come from a place of love not accusing either, and see what’s the response.

Dating Advice for the World From the Dateable Podcast Hosts

Ken: Dating advice for the world. I love that. I just have to go back to the actionability of the first thing you talked about, that both of you talked about, which is you’re doing online dating. Ken: What are the parts of yourself that might not fit into the gender stereotypes you think she should be showing but you kind of feel, can you put that out in your profile? Can you put it out with the new person you’re meeting? And what kind of stuff are you interested in? Sexually, form of relationship? Ken: Even maybe like, “All right. I’ll try meeting someone who’s in a different country or a different state or outside of my age range or height range or weight range, or maybe someone who has a different kind of education.” Ken: That kind of thing of like, “Let me stretch and play here a little bit in very real ways.” Because we could do that so concretely so I really just think what fabulous invitations those two things are to a richer dating life. Yue: That’s a really great scenario you just presented, too, because we get this question a lot. “What should I divulge on my dating profile? What should I say that’s off-limits on a first date?” Our answer is always, “There shouldn’t be anything that’s off-limits if it’s important to you.”

Yue: I think what a lot of people do on their dating profiles or when they meet someone in person is they talk about their deal breakers which I think is so detrimental for any relationship. Because a deal breaker means it’s an absolute thing. There is no budging.

Dateable Podcast Tips on How Online Dating Can Become a Richer Experience

Yue: You are absolutely not going to like someone because of this thing and it makes you come off very close-minded. Yue: So what we always advise people is in your profiles, instead of saying your deal breakers or what you like, what about listing things that you don’t know about but you’re curious about? I actually have no idea if I like to travel to India, I will put that in my profile because I’m curious to know. Yue: Then you’re able to attract people who can say, “Actually, I’ve been to India, let me tell you about the experience.” It just makes you seem very open-minded and just fluid in so many ways. That’s where beautiful things can come out of it. Ken: So these are the kind of pieces of dating advice that people don’t get to hear. Love that. That’s so great. I got to stick with this for a minute because so many people are doing online dating. Ken: So from all of your experience and all of your thinking and reflections, tell us more about kind of other ideas or tips or suggestions for making online dating a richer, more effective experience. What have you learned? What have you heard that you really liked? Just anything. These tips are gold and they’re the kind of things you do not get to hear. Julie: I think just sticking with profiles for now, but I think online dating can go even much further than that clearly. But just to continue on that for a second.

The Dateable Podcast Profile Reviews

Julie: I think one thing that … because we actually do like profile reviews with some of our listeners if they’re interested in doing that service and I’d actually had a really interesting conversation with someone recently. They had a lot of photos, for example, of them doing extreme adventure challenge. Julie: One thing I commented to them was like, “How important is this in your life? Is this something that is make or break, if you don’t have a partner that’s going to do this with you that wouldn’t make you happy?” Julie: Or is this kind of like, “Nice to have or something that I did once or twice.” Or, “I’m kind of just using this photo because I think I should have this extreme photo in there to look cool,” or whatever it may be. Julie: I think from a female perspective, from someone that isn’t a super adventurous travel type of person, my thought was, this feels a little intimidating. I guess where I kind of came to him was, “When people are looking at your profile, they’re trying to imagine a life with you.” Julie: They’re not trying to say, “That guy looks cool because he did this crazy hike.” It’s, “Could I see myself being in this person’s life?” That’s why I think it comes down to how important is this. Julie: To the point of if this really is something that you need in your life and if you had a partner that wasn’t, then by all means, keep that in your profile.

Looking Through the Lens of Building a Partnership

Julie: If it’s not, and what really came out of my conversation with him is he’s like, “I don’t actually really care if I do this with a partner. I’ve done this maybe once or twice in my life.”

Julie: Then my advice was to lose that photo. So I think it really comes down to looking through it as a lens of building a partnership with someone not showing off in your profile.

Yue: That’s such a great one, Julie, because it’s like you guys stop with the fake news when it comes to your dating profiles. I think everyone feels like they have to have certain photos one to show that they’re active, one to show that they’re adventurous and they like to travel, one to show the sensitive side, another one to show them in a group setting so they’re social and fun. Yue: That is not the formula you need to follow in order to attract a partner because everyone has the exact same set of photos. Stop spreading the fake news and just use the photos that are quintessentially who you are. Yue: If you can’t find those photos, it means you don’t know who you are. Why not spend the time to figure out who you are first? It’s crazy to me that the amount of people who come to us for dating advice on their dating profiles and then they’ll push back and say, “But I heard that you’re supposed to have one where you’re half smiling.” Yue: “But I heard that you’re supposed to have one when you’re outside and your hair is flowing, you’re doing a jumping shot.”

A Balance Between Knowing Yourself and Finding out Who You Are

Yue: Where are you getting this news? That’s not you. You’re having someone else tell you who you are. That’s just fake news so stop with it. Julie: Yes and that goes back to this balance again of taking the time to get to know yourself before you’re just going and going and going to find someone else versus finding out who you are, what’s core to you and then making a plan and acting on it. Ken: This is beautiful. I just want to do this thing of extracting to really, really actionable things out of this. One is this kind of theme concept of what you’re trying to do in writing your online profile is give a sense of what it would be like to have you in their life, in someone’s life. What it would be like to have a life with you and to have that as kind of a way that you’re thinking. I love that. Ken: The other thing is for your photograph, that what you’re thinking about is what really shows me. I’m just so certain that those pictures will have more punch and more magnetism and more attractability for the right people. I love those things. Ken: I just want to say, anybody who wants help with their profile, this is a wonderful place to go, is to Julie and Yue. Because so many people will push you to be witty and push you to be cool and push you to be all these different things and those are not the profiles that you want to write. You want to write the profiles like they’re both saying, that are really you.

The Dateable Podcast Way of Writing Your Profile

Yue: I would just say that so many people write their profiles trying to appeal to the masses like it’s a presidential campaign. Think about only writing your profile for that one person. That is the person for you. Stop trying to build as many matches as possible. You’re not trying to attract 1,000 people here. In fact, it’s not a popularity contest. All it takes is just one person so write it for that person. Ken: This is huge. This is huge. That’s so important. I love that. Julie: Because people get so hung up on, “I’m not getting enough matches.” I get it that you need enough volume coming in because you just don’t know where people are at. But also just getting a ton of quantity that’s not going anywhere isn’t really solving your problem either. Ken: I think that’s really true. Also, I just want to say, especially for women who are maybe over 50 and say constantly, “I don’t get that many responses and the kind of thing of so many guys who are in that age range and older only want younger women and are kind of like a kid in a candy store immature.” Ken: There’s really a lot of that going on. You might not get as many matches. In the work that I do with people, as people really become their more essential self as they tune the radio dial to them, to that dial, they may find less people, that there may be less people, but those people will be more resonant, kinder, more available.

The Dateable Podcast Reveals Why Dating Is Not a Numbers Game

Ken: That just is the kind of … When people do what you’re describing, somehow the kind of people they meet and the kind of people that are drawn to them begin to change. There’s a dignity and an integrity to what you’re saying that I think comes across. Julie: You know what? Yue and I have a, we have a belief that isn’t always popular. People will always say that it’s a numbers game and we think it is not a numbers game. Yue: Definitely not. Ken: I’m with you. Julie: Okay, you and your unpopular opinion with us. There are more people out there that agree. But I think we both witness so many people that go on date after date after date and they don’t go anywhere. I know even for myself, like in my 20s when Tinder first came out, I was going on three to four dates a week and they never went past a couple dates. Julie: I think it’s a trap when you think that you need to fill your funnels and the more the better. I think what we’ve seen too, is we had one person that we did an exit interview at one of our favorite podcast episodes. Julie: One guy came to us and said, “I’ve been on hundreds of first dates.” His Hinge account was so full. I’ve never seen someone with more matches in my entire life but none of them went to second dates. We actually ended up calling five of his past dates to hear what happened so it was like an exit interview. Like you have at work. It was eye-opening and fascinating.

The Most Moving Sex Episodes From the Dateable Podcast

Julie: He thought he was getting rejected time and time again but most of the girls actually wanted to go out with him again but he was projecting his own insecurities of rejection onto them.

Julie: For example, a waiter came by and said, “Do you guys want another drink?” And he said, “No.” So the girl obviously thought he was not interested at all. But in his mind, he was feeling like she was not into it or she had to get up early for work the next day. Julie: I think it is not all about the numbers, it’s about having a genuine connection and also putting yourself out there truly and being vulnerable in taking those steps. Ken: I really agree. I really agree. I would love to ask you both a bunch of questions. I mean, there’s so much I want to extract because you’re in such a unique position of really hearing people’s stories in a conscious way. Ken: Thinking about them, reflecting on them, assessing them, weaving them all together, I mean, it’s just kind of an amazing grid of experience and reflection. So I want to really extract more of these goodies. I just want to ask you a few kind of semi-quick questions. Okay? Yue: Okay. Ken: Okay, great. So here’s one question, in all of your episodes where you’ve talked about sex, what’s one thing for each of you that stands out as either very moving or very important that you heard or learned? Yue: For me personally, we’ve actually spoken to a few sex experts, sexperts, I guess, you could call them, and all of them have said it is our time to reclaim our own pleasure.

The Dateable Podcast Promotes Seeking the Ultimate Pleasure

Yue: So I think if you really step back and think about it, the media has really owned our pleasure for so many years to talk about, “We should enjoy sex, we should enjoy this kind of sex.” Pornography has dictated what we think pleasure should be. Yue: And if we really step back from that pleasure that media has portrayed for us and really separate that from what we believe is pleasurable then we’re able to seek the ultimate pleasure for ourselves. That, when it comes to sex is having sex with yourself more and exploring yourself more. Yue: This is one of the most eye-opening conversations I had was, I spoke to this friend of mine who’s in her early 20s and she’s a virgin, and she said, “I am so confused about sex right now because all I learned about sex growing up in Sex Ed was how to not have sex or how to have safe sex but I was never taught how to enjoy sex. So I’m going to spend the next two or three years exploring myself and figuring out all the toys I can use so I know how to pleasure myself. Ken: I love that. That’s just great. Julie: Yes, I mean, I 100% agree with everything you just said. Those have been definitely takeaways I’ve had. I think the other big one that’s come from all the sexperts we’ve talked to is people are so open or we stress open communication so much just about what’s happening in the relationship. Julie: And there’s also the sex positivity that’s happening, that people are more comfortable talking about sex.

The Dateable Podcast Explores the Private World of Sex

Julie: But for whatever reason, a lot of times, we’re hesitant to talk about what’s not happening or not going well in our sex lives with our partners. They’re still just walking on eggshells feeling like, “I can’t discuss this with them because it’s a blame situation or something to that sort.” Julie: I even found myself, I had a friend that came to me asking just for some advice in her relationship, that just things weren’t going very well and I had trouble bringing myself to ask her what her sex life was like with him. I was thinking about it like, “Why did I have such trouble?” There’s this feeling that it’s so private that I can’t share it and I can’t talk about it. Julie: We had Dr. Alexandra Solomon who is a professor at Northwestern for a very popular marriage one-on-one class and author and all that and she said something that has really stuck with me for a while is it doesn’t need to be a blame or shame and that’s why we have so much because we’re not willing to put it out there and look at how we can solve this together. Julie: It doesn’t need to be like, “You’re doing something wrong or I’m doing something wrong.” Especially if we have different sexual desires. It doesn’t always have to be so black and white. Like if one person is more vanilla, the other person is more into kink, maybe there is something that you can start to explore together. Or also maybe there’s a way they can find that outlet elsewhere, with the way …

The Dateable Podcast Explores the Hallmarks of Trauma

Julie: Again, it kind of goes back to what we were talking about earlier of people just defining their own relationships more and it doesn’t have to be just something that we’re prescribed to from what we’ve learned and what we’ve been taught is a relationship. Julie: So the same goes for sexuality, how can you explore together and bring down the barriers and make it something that doesn’t have blame or shame? Ken: I love that. I love that. You know, it’s making me think about how we’ve all been to some degree traumatized around sex. Maybe it’s for some people, it’s small T trauma, for some people, it’s large T trauma. Ken: But we’ve all been traumatized by the kind of shaming and lack of insight and openness and the kind of whole cultural context of secrecy around sex. So we’ve all been traumatized. One of the hallmarks of trauma is black and white thinking. Ken: The more trauma, the more black and white thinking. So you’re describing kind of moving ourselves away from black and white thinking around talking and experiencing our sex life and I love that because that helps reduce and healed trauma. Julie: Right. We were actually, I remember we talked about this in episode two. We had a live show and we had a guest at our live show, we had someone that was there ask a question about what would … Julie: Maybe I’m butchering this question, Yue. If it’s different, but it was something around, “If I sleep with him too soon, will he judge me?” Or like, “Should I sleep with a man on the first date?” Yue: Yes, is it okay to sleep with someone on the first date?

The Dateable Podcast Episode With Dr. Alexandra Solomon

Julie: Right, that’s what it was. Ken: And more like a woman’s question, right? Julie: Yes, I think it actually really surprised us in this day and age because I think just so much has been broken down with that. I also feel like there is still that piece out there that there’s this feeling like these old rules I must follow. Julie: And I think when we talked about this too on the episode with Dr. Alexandra Solomon her point was the fact that it’s coming from, “Am I doing something wrong?” that’s the true problem. It should be coming from a place of like, “I want to pursue my sexual self.” Julie: And at that point that is when you make the decision like, “Is this something I want to do for myself or not?” versus, “If I do this, what outcome will it have with this other person?” Ken: Huge, huge. So that when your question is, “Should I be sleeping with this person now?” it’s not, “How am I going to look doing this?” it’s, “What feels right to me? What really feels organically right at the moment?” Let me just say that if you’re intoxicated, your answer won’t be as clear as if you’re not. Just saying. Yue: Is that from experience, Ken? Ken: Absolutely. It’s from personal experience. Experience as a therapist and it’s so easy to want to drink or get high in early dating because it’s so anxiety-producing.

Favorite Episodes From the Dateable Podcast

Ken: Here’s another question, if you think about your years of being hosts on your podcast, I would just like to ask you to think about one story that stands out right now. That just feels like really hits you at this moment. Ken: Maybe it was really touching or really important, but somehow stands out. Just one story from each of you. I would love to hear. Whatever comes. Julie: It’s so hard. Yue: Julie, I have one. Do you want me to go first? Julie: You go first. Yue: We get this question a lot and I feel like my answer changes depending on what mood I’m in. Today, I’m this mood of journey and having a journey where you don’t end up where you thought you would. On Season Eight, Episode 19, we had a guy on named Ryan Van Duzer, who’s actually a friend of mine. It was called Quest for Love with Ryan Van Duzer. Yue: This story sticks out to me because he is someone who, on the surface level, you would think he was a player, you would think he’s such a party animal, he is just so happy and he can get along with anybody. He flirts with all kinds of girls all the time. But deep down, he is such a romantic and he wants to find love so bad. Yue: In this interview, he talks about all his failures. I guess I wouldn’t even call them failures but experiences of trying to find love and having it not work out. But in the end, what you don’t see so much on the surface level because you just know him on a social scene is that he still believes in love.

The Dateable Podcast Treads the Journey to Find Love

Yue: After all these years, he still believes he’s going to find true love and he will not stop at anything to find it. It’s so inspirational because this guy truly believes that he’s on a journey to find love. Through all the experiences he’s had so far, it’s bringing him that much closer. Julie: I love that episode, too. That was definitely one of my personal favorites. Ken: That’s beautiful. That’s very touching and connected to the theme of what we’re talking about. That it’s like scratching the surface of the way we think people are, there’s a lot more underneath and a lot more possibility and a lot more vulnerability underneath. I love that story. I imagine that he is like a lot of your listeners and my listeners. Julie: You know what? I kind of agree with you, Yue, that depending on my mood, my mood changes. I want to keep something that’s related to this conversation, too, is we had, I believe it was season six, we had an episode called Just Say Yes. Julie: We had our guest Cheryl, who was super single. She was in DC at the time, no real prospects. She’s like, “What can I do to really shake up my dating life?” She’d always been had this list of things to look for and all that and she got inspired. I forget exactly how she came to this. Julie: Maybe she heard it on a podcast. Actually not this podcast. We’re not around back then. But on a book or TV show or something. She basically had this idea that she would just say yes to whoever came into contact with her and asked her on a date.

Coming Out of the Woodwork

Julie: So she basically was going on dates with people that she would never have gone on dates with before. It really helped her. Julie: I think first of all, she did it as an experiment for a month just to see what her mindset ended up coming out after being and a few things I think came to surface for her, is it really did actually help her get clear about what she was looking for in a partner because she had so many people that she was interacting with and people that she might have dismissed earlier because of whatever superficial things. Julie: I think she said she like an MMA fighter or someone that she would never have come in contact with and she actually found him to be like really sweet and sentimental. It was things, again, that wasn’t on the surface that she would not have even gotten the chance to look at if she hadn’t been so open. Julie: But the other big thing that happened for her was that men were really coming out of the woodwork. Nothing else changed in her daily life. She was a teacher so it was in a predominantly female environment. She didn’t change her life. Julie: She didn’t lose weight. She didn’t change her hairstyle, nothing like that but she was getting hit on so many more times than she ever had in her life. And it was the energy that she was putting out there. Julie: Eventually, it actually led her to her husband, who she’s now married to with a kid.

The Dateable Podcast Shuns the Waiting Game

Julie: She was also because she had all this experience from this experiment, she was able to see that he was the first guy, too, that really asked her, for example, like, “Are you dating other people?” Julie: Wanted to know if he was the only person in the running and started to also talk about a life that they could share together. Things that she knew now from so many other people that weren’t coming into a conversation that this was a keeper. Ken: Oh my God. Yue: Julie, I love that one as well. I think that episode was so inspirational on so many levels because a lot of times we think, “Once this happens then I can do this.” We’re waiting for stuff to happen, we’re waiting for milestones but she just proves to you that she can take hold of her own life, she is in control and she didn’t wait for anything to happen. She made things happen. Julie: I feel like I’ve definitely fallen guilty of this, too. It’s like, “I must lose 10 pounds and then I can go back onto the dating scene.” It doesn’t work that way. Usually, no one notices except for you. Ken: It’s totally true. Totally, totally true. That was an amazing story. These were both amazing stories and I think that they captured the whole theme of this conversation which was something about the magic of openness. The risk, the scariness, and how openness actually changes the field, our magnetic field, our internal state, that that commitment to a kind of openness changes things. Yue: So true.

How the Dateable Podcast Has Evolved Over the Last Four Years

Julie: It’s interesting because our podcast, we’ve evolved over the four years that we’ve been doing this. I think both Yue and I thought initially like, “Let’s just do this fun podcast where we hear people’s stories.” We didn’t even expect to learn that much from it. We kind of thought like, “We’ll just share like funny dating stories.” Julie: Over the years, it has evolved to just being this platform where we look at things with just an open and new perspective and hear different perspectives, different experiences, and it allows you to really just change the way that you approach dating, and that’s where it’s been so fascinating to how it’s evolved. Ken: That is why it’s such a delight to get to speak with you both because you both are, going back to the museum, in which you both are curators. You’re curators of news, of stories, of insight, of what’s going on in the front lines and the inside lines. Ken: You do that in a way that is really thoughtful. There are very few people doing that. The information that you have is really, really gold. You got to write a book about this because your perspective is just who else has that? Ken: Who else is approaching these questions with such thoughtfulness and with so many stories? I feel like I would love to have you both back at a later point because I want to extract more wisdom and insight and stories from you. Yue: And vice versa, Ken. Ken: It’s a deal. Julie: The book is in the plan, so don’t worry.

The Beauty of Finding Love

Yue: To quote the great Ken Page when he was on our show, for everyone listening, he said,

The search for love is a big ass journey.

I will always remember that quote because it’s so true. It’s just a big ass journey. It’s never-ending and we’re always constantly learning. That is the beauty of finding love. Ken: Absolutely. Well, it has been a complete joy to have you both on the show. I can’t wait to continue this conversation. But could you tell us a little bit about how people could get in touch with you? Ken: All of this is going to be in the show notes, all these links and everything will be in the show notes. But we’d still love to hear from you every way that people could get in touch with you and what they could get in touch with you for. Julie: Sure. I mean, to start, our podcast is available pretty much on every major platform. Apple Podcast, Spotify, Stitcher Radio, Overcast, pretty much any podcast player that you want to go to. That’s the best way to get in touch with us. But also, on Instagram, we’re @dateablepodcast. Julie: We also have a new Facebook group too called Love in the Time of Corona that’s been really, really interesting, especially as we’re going through something so different and it’s going to change our dating lives even once this is over. Ken: Beautiful. Beautiful. You had said that people could work with you on their profiles, is that correct? Yue: Yes, we also offer curated coaching so you can do profile reviews with us or you can choose one of the coaches that we’ve specifically picked for Dateable listeners.

Closing Thoughts

Julie: If you go to our website, it’s all on there. DateablePodcast.com and then on dateablepodcast.com/coaching is where you can find that. We’re also always looking for submissions for stories. So if people have their own experience because I think what is a little different about our podcast is we talk to experts but we also talk to just real active daters that are going through their own stuff. We love hearing different stories so you can submit them through dateablepodcast.com/story. Ken: Fantastic. Fantastic. Is there anything that each of you would like to say in closing? Just the last closing thought? Yue: Well, I think my closing thought is, and this is from many of our guests, we’ve learned this lesson is that “You have to go through the trenches to find gold.” Yue: And that this journey to find love is that when you feel like you’re in the trenches, when you feel down and you feel like you’re in a dark place, just know that you’re meant to be there and you’re going to get through it but you have to go through it. Yue: There are no hacks or no shortcuts. You just have to feel these feelings, experience what you’re experiencing right now and then you will come out of it. Julie: That’s a really good one. I think the one that I always … and we’ve talked about it throughout this whole thing, it’s the balance of your own self-work and your own self-love and then also relating with others and getting into relationships. It can’t be one or it can’t be the other, it needs to be a combination of both.

Doing Self Work Is a Pre-Requisite to Working With Someone

Julie: But I think if you don’t do the self-work, then it makes being in a relationship really difficult because you don’t actually know how to state your needs, you don’t know how to have that healthy communication, and you don’t know how to actually work with someone. Julie: I think at the end of the day, the most successful relationships that we’ve either heard from experts or we’ve heard from people in them or we’ve experienced ourselves is when two people are committed to making it work and to being open as a team, to figure out how to make things better for both partners and it’s not one person versus the other. Julie: It’s not, “I feel this way, you feel this way. It’s like how do we solve this together and make a relationship that works for both of us?” Ken: I love that. I love both of these points. They’re so key and they’re beautiful. Having you both on the show was just an absolute delight. Yue: Thank you so much for having us on the show. Julie: Thank you. Ken: Thank you both. I want to thank everybody for listening to Julie and Yue and the Dateable Podcast. If you want to get a transcript of this complete episode, just go to deeperdatingpodcast.com. I encourage you to join my mailing list and you’ll get a free ebook as well as the first two chapters of my book Deeper Dating. So thankful to everybody in the listening community for being here. See you all on the next episode of the Deeper Dating Podcast.

Cultivating gratitude is wonderful, but forced gratitude clouds our judgment and creates self-doubt and self-recrimination. Sometimes, it’s much wiser to just admit that we’re hurting, that things don’t feel right, that something just has to change. In this episode, we’ll explore when gratitude really helps us and when it holds us back. And we’ll explore how to use the power of clarity to create positive change in our lives.

Table of Contents

• When It’s Dehumanizing
• When It Feels Bad in the Heart
• When There’s Bitterness

Episode Introduction: When Gratitude Doesn’t Work

Everyone knows that having gratitude is a wonderful thing. But the pressure to feel gratitude when things feel wrong to us actually hurts and weakens us. What’s a healthy way that we can hold gratitude and non-gratitude in our lives? Stay tuned to this episode of the Deeper Dating Podcast to learn more. Hello everybody, and welcome to the Deeper Dating Podcast. I’m Ken Page, and I’m a psychotherapist, the author of Deeper Dating, and the host of this podcast. And today, I’m going to be talking about how the pressure to feel gratitude can actually hurt us. This week and every week, I’m going to share with you the best tools I know to help you find love and keep it flourishing. Because the skills of dating are nothing more than the skills of love. And if you want to learn more about the deeper dating path, just go to deeperdatingpodcast.com. If you sign up for my mailing list, you’ll get free gifts, and you’ll also be able to get a lot of information about new events, new workshops, new courses, and the work of other people I deeply respect. I also just want to say that everything I share in this podcast is educational in nature. It’s not medical or psychiatric advice or treatment. If you’re experiencing any serious psychological conditions, please seek professional help.

Subscribe and Leave Ken a Review

Finally, if you like what you’re hearing here, it would be a wonderful gift if you could subscribe and leave me a review. So let’s jump right in. So today, I want to talk about the healing gift of not having to be grateful. Now I deeply believe in gratitude. I’m not saying that gratitude is not a precious thing, that what we appreciate appreciates. That the act of finding the good and finding the gift is the wisest thing that we can do. What I’m talking about more is what Jeff Brown calls, ” new cage thinking,” which is this kind of sense of pressure that even if something feels wrong to us, we’re supposed to accept it, be grateful for it, let it be. When in fact often our insides are telling us this isn’t right. So cultivating gratitude is wonderful, but forced gratitude clouds our judgment and usually, it mutates into self-recrimination. This feeling of having to find gratitude when things feel wrong is great. But let’s acknowledge what feels wrong, or we’re going to be hypnotizing ourselves out of our own personal power. We need to also learn to honor feelings that are not bitter, but not exactly gratitude. A feeling of emptiness inside, a feeling of longing, or a gut-level sense that something is wrong. Those troubling feelings really hold a huge amount of the key for achieving our most precious life goals.

When It’s Dehumanizing, Don’t Force Premature Gratitude

So I think in our quest for growth, we have to mature past that kind of dehumanizing cheerfulness of positive thinking that can pressure us to be grateful for all things always. As if anytime we’re not grateful, we’re at fault. So finding deeper gratitude when we’re also acknowledging what feels wrong, that’s a good thing. That’s a great thing. But so often we tell ourselves that if we’re not feeling grateful, then we’re not in a good space. When we chloroform our innate sense of discrimination, that leads to self-doubt, not enlightenment. So often the opposite of what we think of as gratitude isn’t ingratitude, it’s self-love. So many times, I’ve seen people keep trying to convince themselves to be more accepting and more patient and more disciplined to be the bigger person. But their gut-level discomfort is actually dead-on accurate. I’ve seen so many loved ones, I’ve seen myself, I’ve seen my clients, stay too long in unhealthy relationships or jobs just because they thought they weren’t strong enough or grateful enough or disciplined enough to fix things. So I had a dear friend, his name was Michael Clemente. I’ve talked about him before. He died of AIDS in the early ’90s and in one of his performances he announced that he had found a way to get blood from a stone. He was going to teach his audience his tried and true method perfected through years of relationships with unavailable people.

When You Are Defined As The “Sick One” and Being Scapegoated, That’s When Gratitude Doesn’t Work

Cultivating gratitude is wonderful, but forced gratitude clouds our judgment and creates self-doubt and self-recrimination. Sometimes, it’s much wiser to just admit that we’re hurting, that things don’t feel right, that something just has to change. In this episode, we’ll explore when gratitude really helps us and when it holds us back. And we’ll explore how to use the power of to create positive change in our lives. I think one of the greatest “aha moments” in my training as a psychotherapist came when I learned about the concept of “The assigned sick one.” So in unhealthy family systems, often it’s the most sensitive child who takes on that role, and that child registers what’s broken in the family and can’t bear that awareness. So she or he tries countless ways of calling for help, and a lot of them are immature, unhelpful, convulsive, and that strengthens the family’s case that the sick one is the problem. But in many ways the sick one is the wise one, even though she or he probably feels broken, weak, constantly angry, anything but wise, it’s a healthy family that finally becomes brave enough to listen to the painful callings of this sick one. When that happens, the family can begin to heal.

Inhumane and Relentless Positivity

So I think that all of us have a healthy sick one inside and that’s the part of us that says something is wrong when the rest of our mind says, “Keep pushing. Try harder, be more grateful, don’t weaken.” And in the face of that kind of inhumane and relentless positivity, we’re left feeling broken or weak or flawed in some irreparable essential way.

So at the risk of real oversimplification and also not including cases of active addiction or untreated mental disorders, we feel good when important things feel right in our lives, and we register that rightness with feelings of peace or gratification or stability. When things feel wrong, we feel empty or sad or hurting. To a large degree, we really can trust those simple feelings and use them to lead us out of painful situations into more fulfilling ones. I know for me that the recognition that all the ways that I registered wrongness inside were in so many cases not weakness but a deeper truth. I came from a family that was filled with things like that. But I also came from a family that was ultimately willing to listen to my calls of what felt broken and how I felt broken in the family and begin to shift and have all of us kind of look at and own our own stuff. But that took a lot of work and certainly years and years and years of my life feeling like the sick one, like the crazy one, like the wrong one.

When It Feels Bad in the Heart, That’s When Gratitude Doesn’t Work

So I also know that in day-to-day life, it’s so easy when I feel, or when other people feel, kind of that sense of emptiness, that sense of wrongness, that sense of grinding inside, that sense of rushing too hard or not grabbing onto life, whatever the sense is. It just feels bad. It feels bad in the body. It feels bad in the heart, and it’s so easy to pretend that that’s not going on. But I really think that one of our greatest acts of beauty is when we can say, “There’s something broken here. There’s something wrong here. There’s a hole here, and I can feel that, and then I can listen to it.” And I think this happens in many places in our lives and definitely happens in intimate relationships. I know for me in looking at my life when I’ve been in a situation where again and again I kept telling myself that I should be stronger, that I should be a better person, that I should be a bigger person, that I should be more patient, that I shouldn’t be swayed or controlled or manipulated or frightened in ways that I have been. When I kept saying that same thing to myself, those were always signs that I was not being honest with myself.

Learning To Listen to Ourselves Helps Us Realize When Gratitude Doesn’t Work

The poet, Audre Lorde, said this wonderfully. She said,

When I lived through pain without recognizing it consciously, I robbed myself of the power that can come from using that pain, the power to fuel some movement beyond it.

So there’s the worry then that if we just kind of completely go along with and give room for our annoyance, our anger, our needs, that we can almost be kind of narcissistic, it can become all about us and everything we need and we don’t learn the greater skills of acceptance and that’s a risk. There are risks on both sides. That’s why it’s truly, truly an art. But I think that when we really learn to listen to ourselves and the things that feel wrong, we equally realize what is our stuff. We apologize more frequently. We just have more room to own it. Because when we tell ourselves not to feel what we’re feeling when something is wrong, we do one of two things. We push our energy and our power down and we become weakened. Or we become strident and angry and kind of immature in our responses. It’s like pushing the beach ball down, and then ultimately, it has to pop up.

So there’s a bravery in admitting that things aren’t right. In , first and foremost, admitting to ourselves, “Things don’t feel right, and I have to do something about it,” and it’s bravery too to speak about that in our relationships.

When A Deeper Issue Is Ignored And Needs to Be Honored, That’s When Gratitude Doesn’t Work

And as I said before, I know countless people that are in relationships that don’t feel right. They stay because they keep telling themselves, “Maybe I’m asking for too much. Maybe I need too much.” And when we’re in a situation where we keep telling ourselves that and it doesn’t work, that means that something deeper that is off needs to be looked at and honored because it’s real and it’s true. And there’s power in that, and there’s healing in that. There’s also a tremendous amount of pain which is why having someone else to talk to, why having meditation, why having tools like tapping or visualization, or the Inner Mentor™ process, which I teach in episode three, why these things help so incredibly. And as Vito Russo said, “The truth will set you free, but first, it will make you miserable.” So I want to honor the worth of that miserable state of those feelings that just hurt and don’t feel right because there’s greatness. There’s a kind of greatness on the other side of facing that and acknowledging that, in a way that’s not reactive but holds truth and gets to really reflect on, “What’s wrong here. What feels broken here? I’m not going to fool myself about that anymore.”

When There’s Bitterness, That’s When Gratitude Doesn’t Work

That’s something that you can do right now while listening to this podcast. You could even take a moment and pause it to think, “what am I telling myself is okay, but my intuition, my gut says, ‘This isn’t okay. This is not right.’ Where am I pretending there’s not an emptiness inside? Where am I pretending that if I just did things differently, I wouldn’t feel badly in this relationship again and again?” So I think that the traps of bitterness and forced gratitude are equally unwise. And the art is being able to hold the reality of what doesn’t feel good and then be able to work with that in a way that is resilient and can find the places of gratitude, but then not going to be the ones we told ourselves that we were supposed to be grateful for. So as Leonard Cohen said in his song " target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer external" data-wpel-link="external">Anthem, “Forget your perfect offering. There’s a crack in everything, and that’s how the light gets in.” That is so true for us.

The places where we feel the most broken often don’t need to be fixed. What they need is to be heard.

So I know this episode was a little bit shorter, but I think I said the pieces that I wanted to say. So I want to thank you all for listening. I want to encourage you to go to deeperdatingpodcast.com and sign up for my mailing list if you like what you heard here, and I look forward to seeing you on the next episode of the Deeper Dating Podcast.

In this episode, you’ll learn 5 simple shifts that will speed your path to love–and help you learn deeper self-love and authentic, unforced confidence. These tips may fly in the face of much of what you’ve been taught about dating, but they have the power to truly transform your search for love, save you huge amounts of time, and deepen your capacity to nurture the love that’s in your future!

Episode Table of Contents

• Your Path to Love Is a Journey to Be Who You Truly Are
• Taking the Next Step of Your Path to Love
• Values-Based Events and Communities Open Your Path to Love
• A Beautiful Sadness You Carry on Your Path to Love
• Your Path to Love Requires Trusting Your Discrimination

Episode Introduction: Your Path to Love

There are six tools and one very, very profound insight that absolutely transforms our search for love and change our lives as well. Stay tuned to this episode of the Deeper Dating podcast to learn those tools and this insight. Hello, and welcome to the Deeper Dating podcast. I’m Ken Page, and I’m a psychotherapist, the author of Deeper Dating, and the host of this podcast. Today, I’m going to share with you some very powerful, wonderful, and simple tools that really will change the way you search for love and change your relationship to your intimacy journey in some very important ways. This week and every week I’m going to offer you the greatest skills I know to help you find beautiful, nourishing love and keep it flourishing in your life. Because the skills of dating are nothing more than the skills of intimacy. And the skills of intimacy are the greatest and most important skills of all for a happy and rich life. If you want to learn more about the Deeper Dating path to real intimacy, just go to DeeperDatingPodcast.com. There, you can sign up for my mailing list, you’ll get some free gifts, including an eBook and you’ll learn more about how to use these ideas to transform your own intimacy journey, and you’ll find a transcript of this and every other episode. And you’ll get to hear about my new downloadable course, which takes you through the entire Deeper Dating journey, step-by-step with my kind of much more close and personal guidance. I also want to say that everything that I share in this podcast is educational in nature. It’s not treatment or medication, or psychological advice. If you’re experiencing any serious psychological or psychiatric conditions, please seek professional help.

Subscribe and Leave Ken a Review

If you like what you’re learning here, it would be a fabulous gift to me if you could subscribe and leave me a review. Some of the reviews that I’ve gotten are just so incredibly touching, and I really appreciate them. If you’d like to leave one too, that would be great. Okay, let’s jump in. This is an exciting episode today, and I’m really glad to be sharing this with you. I’m going to be offering you about six different specific tips that will all tie in together and really make a huge difference. They also turn your search for love into an adventure of growth and healing, as you’ll see. And then, I’m going to talk about a very kind of deep, deep concept about what the broadest, broadest, truest journey, as I understand it, of intimacy really is, and that’ll connect to the tools that I give you in the beginning. I’m just going to jump right in. The first one is allowing yourself the bravery of being your authentic self. It sounds simple, sounds sweet, sounds corny, sounds pat. It’s brave. It’s brave to do that. The experience of sharing who we are in our heart, letting people see it, finding that place of flow where we’re really connected with who we are, and being that person in another person’s presence is an act of intimacy unto itself. And doing that gives a message that we’re comfortable in our own skin.

Your Path to Love Is a Journey to Be Who You Truly Are

But here’s the funny thing. So much dating advice tells us, “Yeah, definitely, absolutely be authentic. Be authentic.” But then you also have to really be masculine enough, or you have to be feminine enough, or got to act confident, or just throw in some good flirting in there, or whatever it is that it tells us. And it’s impossible to be authentic and something other than yourself at the same time. It’s very crazy-making advice to be told, “Be authentic, but be something other than you are.” So much dating advice fits into that category. What you want to be is you, and it’s brave, because then when you are you, it’s impossible to say how much time and heartache you save by doing that. Because, when you’re not you, the people who are looking for someone like you will miss you. They won’t see you. They won’t notice you. Your beauty is not going to shine, because it can’t shine when you’re being something other than yourself. And also the other thing that happens is that people who have a need to step on someone who’s not secure, but is pretending to be secure and confident, those people will gravitate towards you. So, so many reasons why it’s an act of quiet violence against your being and your future to be anything other than the amazing and authentic being that you really are. And to just look for the people who love that. Because there’s a million people who won’t, but they’re not the people you want. That’s concept number one. It’s one that I’ve talked about a lot in this podcast.

A Crippling Scrutiny Based on Fear

This is another fabulous one. This is what I call squinting. I know, for me, for many, many, many years there was a crippling self-scrutiny but also a crippling scrutiny of other people based on fear, based on insecurity, based on my own self-judgment that made me say no to a lot of people, look down on people, judge people, step away from people who might’ve been wonderful. Because of this hair trigger judgmental quality that I had that was based on a deep fear of being hurt. So many of us have this, and the culture also supports it in saying, “You’ve got to look for someone who is X, Y and Z, and is going to look this way and that way, and has to accessorize right,” or whatever it is. So, this is the concept, it’s squinting. If you have ever seen an artist work on a portrait, you might notice that sometimes they squint. I asked an artist once why she did that, and she said,

“I do it, because when I squint, I don’t notice the harsh outlines of the subject as much anymore. I kind of notice the subject’s spirit, and I’m not distracted by the outlines, by the exterior. I kind of can capture the spirit a little bit more.”

So when we date, when it comes to things like outfits, weight, age, I mean, I’ll say this now, and like I say it a million times, you can’t make yourself attracted to someone you’re not attracted to, nor should you try to do that.

Squint and Soften Your Path to Love

But if someone is somewhere in the range and you just don’t like their outfit, or you don’t like their music, or their laugh irritates you, or they’re three years or five years or eight years or 10 years your junior or senior, or junior or senior to the age range that you’re looking at, and you say “no” for those reasons, they live too far away…… They don’t have the education that maybe you thought was so important that your partner had, even though they have a lot of smarts. Whatever it is, those are areas where we need to squint. We need to soften that judgment. Because when we go into a dating event, well, I know when I used to go into dating situations, that hair trigger part of me was so activated, so ready to tell me that I’m not enough, and so ready to tell me that the other person was not enough, and the amount of tears and suffering and pain that came from that hair trigger response was pretty endless. But actually, that’s inaccurate. That pain didn’t come from that hair trigger response, because I can’t control that hair trigger response. It came from listening to that hair trigger response. So when we notice that hair trigger response, and we say, “You know what? Maybe that was a little too quick of a judgment. I could feel that inside.” We soften, and we squint, and we look at the kind of spirit of this person.

Taking the Next Step of Your Path to Love

And over time when we do that, if the person is a match but doesn’t fit the kind of qualifications we thought we had to have, over time, the nature of the connection will overtake and eclipse those original kind of judgements and assumptions – if it’s a good match. And research backs up that this is really true, as well. So, that’s the second thing. It’s squinting. When you’re with someone, if things bug you, or make you say, “This person is just out of the framework of someone I would date,” but you’re kind of attracted to them, there’s a spark, there’s a goodness, there’s a quality you really like, squint. Squint. It doesn’t mean you’re going to marry them. It means you’re going to take the next step in getting to know them, and you’re not going to let hair trigger fear which manifests as some kind of judgementalness, which you think is truth, take you away from the possibility of potentially a really wonderful, sweet relationship. I know that the inability to do that kept me from love for decades. So that’s the other tool that I want to offer. Now I’m going to mention another one. It’s about enthusiasm. You meet someone, let’s say you’re really excited by them. For me and for so many people, that’s been kind of a quandary. Because you feel enthusiastic, but you feel like, “Well, I don’t want to overwhelm this person. I should probably play a little bit hard to get, I don’t want to show this enthusiasm. I don’t want to be such a gust of wind that I blow out this new flame of their potential growing interest in me.”

Treasuring Your Enthusiasm

Here’s what I want to say about enthusiasm. There’s only one thing that works when it comes to you being enthusiastic about someone new, and that is to treasure your enthusiasm. Now, that does not mean that you want to lose track of their signals and their cues, because often in the beginning when one of us is feeling very enthusiastic, the other might be feeling a little bit more shy or timid. Maybe both of you feel enthusiastic. Still, you want to go carefully. You want to go slowly. You want to get to know the person. Probably better not to have sex too early. We’ll talk about that in a little bit. But if you don’t treasure your enthusiasm, here’s what’s going to happen, you’re going to be ashamed of it. It’s going to turn into a feeling, and you’ll press it down. You’ll press it down, and when you press it down, and if you’re too good at pressing it down and keeping it there, that’s not a great sign. Most of us though press it down and then it kind of comes out sideways in a little bit of an embarrassing way or not the best way. That’s what happens when we are ashamed. We kind of press it down. We think we shouldn’t have it. We become awkward. If instead, we honor that sense of enthusiasm, we take pleasure in it, we delight in it, it’s a wonderful thing to be that enthusiastic about someone. It’s a great, great thing. If we honor that enthusiasm, we will be more capable of pivoting and creating, and not necessarily overwhelming the person with our enthusiasm, but not being ashamed of it.

The Wisdom Path

Because, being ashamed of our enthusiasm leads nowhere good. It’s a delicate, delicate thing, but you want to honor your enthusiasm. You want to show your enthusiasm too. And you can show it in conscious, wonderful ways by letting the person know about qualities that you like about them. You don’t want to overwhelm them. You want to be sensitive. If you’re showing your enthusiasm is coming out of a need to get them to say positive things to, and they’re not really saying positive things back yet, those are behaviors that you kind of need to hold back on a little.

Because one of the greatest gifts you can give another person is a sense of space. But that doesn’t mean that you don’t have a right to honor and delight in your enthusiasm. Is that a little complicated? Yes. But it’s a wisdom path and wisdom paths always take a little bit of work and growth and development. So, honor your enthusiasm.

The research about playing hard to get is this. It’s something I’ve talked about before. The research shows that if you play hard to get, the person, in some cases, might want you more, temporarily. But they will like you less. So it is better not to play hard to get but to show your enthusiasm and your pleasure in someone, but in a way that honors your sense of their space needs.

Values-Based Events and Communities Open Your Path to Love

Eli Finkel, who did a lot of great research on this very subject in speed dating events, kind of says that the thing to do is to somehow give the message that it’s not that you’re just looking for anybody, it’s that certain particular things really matter to you, and you see those in this person, and that is exciting and wonderful to you. That is very positive. People respond to that. It’s like an aphrodisiac to be able to do that. Once again, it’s connected to honoring your enthusiasm in this journey and your delight in meeting someone new who seems wonderful. Now I’m going to skip to something kind of really different. I say it all the time. All the time. I’m going to say it again. Values-based events and communities are the best place to meet people, in general. Of course, you might meet someone on the street. You might meet someone on a dating site that has nothing to do with values-based anything. But you still meet them that way. All those things are possible. But when you’re at an event with people who share your values, your passions, and your interests, you will glow. You will shine. You will feel in some way at home. And hence, the person you’re going to be is going to be a broader, more open, more delightful, more connected version of you. The quality in the atmosphere in events like this invites connection and closeness. So, now we can’t be doing that in person, but there are so many ways to do that virtually. Looking up keywords in dating sites when you’re searching for people you’re interested in, where those keywords match the values that you’re interested in.

A MiracleGro for Our Fear

Finding online communities in areas that you’re interested in. Dating websites that are niche for people who are interested in what you’re interested in. But I can’t tell you what a great and powerful tip that is to speed things up in your search for love. Here’s the last one. The last one is to wait with sex. Now, for some people, they can have sex right away, and it’ll be fabulous, and it’ll be bringing them much closer. And it’ll be something that cements the beginning of their relationship. This is not a moralistic thing. But for most of us, sex without a level of safety that matches the physical intimacy is like MiracleGro for our fear. What happens really often when we have sex too early, is one person feels needy, clingy, insecure, and the other person feels like, “I’m out of here. I’m going.” Because it’s just this awkward thing of this huge aperture of being, this deep, deep openness and vulnerability on a physical level. And then you see the person and the connection has nowhere near match that and it’s just like more comfortable to get away. Those are two things that can happen. Because when our level of safety doesn’t match our level of physical connection, there’s a great risk of that happening. That I think is particularly true for highly sensitive people. It’s not true for everybody. And if it’s not true for you, and you can really have sex right away and still be available for full-on intimacy, more power to you. But most of us trick ourselves to think that we can do that, when in fact we can’t.

The Part of Us That Needs to Be Stronger

And alcohol and drugs really help us have sex too quickly. That’s why it’s not a great idea to get really intoxicated in early dating. I mean, it’s not such a great idea to get really intoxicated ever. But in early dating it’s especially, in some ways, particularly important. Those were some kind of very nitty gritty, and I think, wonderful and important and positive tools to help you truly transform the way you search for love and turn it into an adventure of growth that really works. Try these things. You will experience deep growth, opening, and shifts in the way you date. But now I want to shift to kind of a more meta thing, something very kind of big and deep. It’s about a way of understanding our intimacy journey. As we take this conscious, deeper intimacy journey, there’s a way in which one part of us really needs to soften, and another part of us really needs to become stronger. I’ll talk first about the part that needs to soften. All of us hold on tight against the pain of being hurt, against the pain of having the rug pulled out from under us, having the ball dropped by the other person. Also, we become kind of toughened and tightened just by the pace of life and the demands of life where we have to kind of squeeze tight in order to get through and get stuff done. We all do that. And when we do that, especially when we get easily afraid or we get defensive, we push intimacy away, but we don’t even know we’re doing it. We’re just goal focused. We’re just protection focused. We don’t even know that we’re doing it.

A Beautiful Sadness You Carry on Your Path to Love

This is something that I think during this kind of sheltering at home period where there’s a little more time, we can allow ourselves to soften in some ways a little bit more and feel the things that are kind of on the shoulder of the road of our being that we don’t normally let ourselves feel or acknowledge or sense. And when we do that, we soften, and when we soften, amazing stuff happens. Sometimes there’s a sadness, but that sadness is a beautiful sadness, because it’s the sadness that we carry in our heart that is our humanity. I know for me, when I’m in touch with my sadness, I’m an inch away from my love. And I know that when I’m stressed or kind of outwardly focused, and when my defensive structures lock in, I don’t feel my sadness. I just keep thinking about what’s next, what has to be done. I become impatient. For me, when I feel sadness, it’s a harbinger. It’s a mark of being closer to my soul. So we may feel sadness, we may feel longing, we may feel joy. We get wisps of inspiration and guidance, but that only happens when our defensive ways of being soften. And that’s when inspiration leaks through. That’s when inspiration begins to just kind of hit us in different ways, so there’s a softening that needs to happen. Or when we’re with someone and we like them and we don’t want to show them that we like them, we feel vulnerable or scared. Brene Brown said something so wonderful. She says,

“Vulnerability is the last thing we want to show, and it’s the first thing we look for in another person.”

Different Techniques to Soften the Defensive Structures

When we’re in that kind of a state and we’re not softened, we will miss so many wisdom cues and we’ll miss so many love cues. And when we soften, we will feel the wisdom cues, and the love cues, and the intimacy cues that we otherwise might miss. So anything that helps us soften. I know for me, I do tapping. I keep saying I’m going to do this, and I haven’t done it yet, but I’m going to do some episodes to teach people tapping. It’s a wonderful, wonderful technique. You can just go to YouTube and look up Dawson Church or " target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer external" data-wpel-link="external">Nick Ortner and learn a lot more about tapping that way. That’s something I use. I use meditation, lots of different things, lots of different techniques. The Inner Mentor™ technique, which you can learn on, I believe it’s podcast three, is an incredible technique to help you tune into that softened place, your own inner wisdom and intuition. Whatever techniques you use, maybe it’s just giving yourself space in life. Whatever you can do that helps you soften that defensive structure and feel the softness of your being, you’re giving yourself an indescribably invaluable gift. That’s the softening piece, but then there’s a strengthening piece too, and that’s around strengthening our discrimination. We move into a really different zone here. And that is when we’re in interaction with people, especially when our insides are softened so that we can feel the subtler winds of experience. We sense when things feel safe, when things feel nourishing, when things feel cold, when they feel scary, when they feel not right, when we start getting insecure, where we feel ashamed, et cetera, et cetera.

The Big Question

We sense those things. That’s the quality of discrimination where we can actually feel the big question and this is what I teach, is the biggest number one question. If you’re looking for really wonderful love, the question is, does my soul feel safe with this person? Of course, there’s a million other questions, but when we lead with that question, our world changes period, the end, unequivocally and amazingly true. So often we tell ourselves, “I’m just being too sensitive. I have to get over this,” when we’re with someone who is kind of like criticizing us, or somehow devaluing us, or maybe not able to listen to what we say, and give us a sense that these very personal things we’re saying are actually held, heard and cherished. And so we tell ourselves, “I’m being too sensitive. I have to try harder. I have to give more. I have to forgive. I have to let this go,” et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, and we lose the track of our clarity. I heard it described in a wonderful book for psychotherapists, it was a book called the Uses of Countertransference. He said, “As therapists, we need to really notice the exquisite nuances of what we feel when we’re with a client, because those tell us so much.” And sometimes we don’t listen to that. We say, “Maybe that’s my stuff. I’m not going to listen to that.” “But if we do that too often,” he says, “it’s like someone who is a safe cracker who loses the sensitivity of their fingers, where they can hear those tiny, tiny clicks that help them unlock the safe.”

Your Path to Love Requires Trusting Your Discrimination

For us, listening to the tiny clicks; clicks of nourishment, clicks of disappointment, clicks of hurt, and honoring those is really an act of strengthening of self. The piece that I think needs to get stronger is trusting our discrimination. When I look at the kind of broad vision of kind of the many, many, many people that I’ve worked with in my private practice, and in my courses and classes and intensives, I think that more people discount their discrimination, then people overreact based on their discrimination. Not that that doesn’t happen too, almost as much, but I think the bigger issue is the not listening to the subtle registering of what feels right and what doesn’t feel right. What feels safe to our soul and what doesn’t. So that’s an area that needs to be strengthened. But this takes so much wisdom, and that’s why the skills of dating are really the skills of love. Because, where is it that it’s discrimination and where is it that it’s actually a reflexive, judgemental quality to protect ourselves? Where is it really that we’re being forgiving and open and accepting in a good way? Where is it that we’re accepting something that we shouldn’t be accepting? That’s why this truly is a wisdom journey. That’s why I deeply encourage people to take on different practices that will help you find your own inner wisdom. Like the Inner Mentor™ process helps me every single day, and that’s episode three. It helps me every single day to figure out what’s intuition and what’s defense. My friends do that as well and that’s another place.

Your Path to Love Is a Rich Intimacy Journey

Our friends who have wisdom and really truly love us, five minutes with them will be the equivalent of an hour of trying to figure things out on our own in many, many cases. The importance of being able to talk to friends who know us and trust us is amazing. Practices to help us get in touch with our intuition. That’s why this is an intimacy journey and such a rich intimacy journey. We’ve talked about so many things today. And I want to just encourage you to just take a minute now and think, what one thing hits you the most? Just hold that to your heart and hold it to your intentions, because that’s your baby. If you take that out of here and do something with that, results will absolutely come your way. Thank you for listening. So glad to be with you again, and I look forward to seeing you in the next episode of the Deeper Dating podcast. And remember, just go to DeeperDatingPodcast.com, and when you go there, if you sign up for my mailing list, you’ll get a free gift of an eBook called The Five Keys to Deeper Dating. You can also get the first two chapters of my book, Deeper Dating, which teach you how to discover your core gifts, something else we’ve talked about a lot in this podcast. Thank you again so much and have a great week.

There truly is stunning power in the qualities you hide in your love relationships. These parts feel most tender, most passionate, most central to our inner lives. When we learn to appreciate and champion these “Core Gifts” our worlds change–and our search for love moves toward available people who love us for who we are. In this episode, you’ll discover your most central Core Gifts in the parts of yourself you hide.

Table of Contents

• The Qualities You Hide Within the Center of a Target
• A Sense of Great Awe for the Qualities You Hide
• Questions That Reveal the Qualities You Hide
• The Antidote Question to Unveil the Qualities You Hide

Episode Introduction: The Qualities You Hide

Did you know that the part of yourself that you’re the most timid to reveal in your love life actually holds the key to one of your greatest core gifts in romance? Stay tuned to this episode of the Deeper Dating podcast to learn what your core gift is. Hello everybody and welcome to The Deeper Dating Podcast. I’m Ken Page and I’m a psychotherapist and the author of the book Deeper Dating. I’m the host of this podcast and the creator of the Deeper Dating online course. Today we’re going to talk about something really profound and really important and very usable. It’s the part of yourself that you’re most timid to show in your romantic relationships and is actually connected to your deepest core gifts. When you know how that’s true, your relationship life begins to change and your dating life changes in powerful ways. This week and every week, I’m going to share with you the greatest tools that I know to help you find love and keep it flourishing and heal your life in the process because the skills of dating are nothing more than the skills of love and the skills of love are the greatest skills in life. And if you want to learn more about the deeper dating path to real intimacy, just go to deeperdatingpodcast.com and if you sign up for my mailing list, you’ll get free gifts and you’ll learn more about how to use these ideas to transform your own intimacy journey.

Subscribe and Leave Ken a Review

And you’ll also get a complete transcript of this episode and every other episode. Finally, you’ll get to learn about my new downloadable course where I get to guide you step by step through the entire deeper dating journey. I also want to say that everything I share in this podcast is educational in nature. It is not medical or psychiatric advice or treatment for any condition and if you’re experiencing any concerning psychological or psychiatric symptoms, please seek professional help. And finally, if you like what you’re learning here, it would be a fabulous thank you if you subscribed and left me a review. If this message touches your heart, please share it with someone who you think would also appreciate it. So thank you so much for all of that and let’s dive in now. In the work that I teach, what I’ve come to discover and what I believe more and more deeply all the time is that the parts of ourselves that have been least understood, most taken advantage of and have kind of gotten us into the most trouble or that we feel the most insecure about actually connect to our greatest gifts, what I call our core gifts. And in my courses, in everything I do in my book, I spend so much time helping people be able to name and identify their core gifts. So what are core gifts?

Core gifts are the places you feel the most deeply.

The Qualities You Hide Within the Center of a Target

If you imagine a target and you imagine that the closer you get into the center of the target, the closer you’re getting into the very essence of your being, the true you. The place where you feel and care the most. The place where the deepest kind of almost uncountable dimensions of wisdom are available to you, but also where you can be hurt the most deeply because you are so much more at stake. And the further out you get in this target, the more you become a kind of airbrushed defended version of yourself. In this work and on this path, we come to realize that those core parts of ourselves that I call our core gift, that we often learned we had to suppress or hide or cover in order to survive, are actually the key to the greatest meaning in life and to our success in our creativity, in our profession, in our relationships, in our relationship with ourself and definitely also in our search for love. And this is such a powerful and rich concept. Today, I’m going to be talking with you about one way to discover your core gifts. One particular core gift that I think is going to be one of the most important ones in your own personal journey and your search for love. When this core gift is named and when it’s honored and treasured, you will see profound, profound shifts happen in your own inner organization, in the people you’re attracted to, in the people who are attracted to you and in the way that you live your life.

Different Processes to Discover the Qualities You Hide

So that’s obviously a really big deal. In my course we spend a lot of time looking for what our core gifts are. There are a number of different processes that we do to help people discover their core gifts. But there’s one process that we do for one particular, kind of one way in to look at this. That is this – it’s thinking about what’s the part of myself that I am the most shy or timid or vulnerable around revealing in romance and in love, in sex, in intimacy. What’s the part of myself that’s really me but it just feels too tender, too vulnerable, maybe too passionate, maybe too generous, maybe too wild, maybe too quiet, maybe too tender. And I’m going to talk about why this is so. but whatever that quality is, the degree to which you cherish it, the degree to which you cherish that part of you, the degree to which you honor it and dignify it is the degree to which you’re going to find people who also honor it and cherish it and the degree to which you’re going to find yourself, your true essential self in love and in life. So there’s something nuclear about the parts of ourselves that we’re shy about revealing. Why? Because within that lies a core gift that we haven’t been taught by life, how to honor and treasure and validate and it’s the secret, it’s the secret to self-love.

The Secret to Self Love

It’s kind of a real secret in life to learn to find the gift in that place and that’s what we’re going to do today. By the end of this episode, you will have an idea of what that attribute is and you’ll have a deeper sense of why it is actually a profound gift, and this is actually a formula. The degree to which you honor that part of you is the degree to which you will be happier in love. You will make better choices in love. And the degree to which you feel ashamed, ambivalent, you hide that part of yourself. You’re controlled by the shame and the trauma around people who have not treated that part of you well. To that degree that you experience shame and hide it. To that degree, you’re going to be sexually and romantically attracted to people who aren’t good for you or you’re going to just hide from love. So this is an amazing formula and it’s true and you’ll understand that more as we go on. But I’m just going to stop for a minute and talk about just kind of a little bit of the theory. This is the deeper physics of dating I think and why is that so?

A Sense of Great Awe for the Qualities You Hide

And this is where I have a sense of great awe. Like I have a sense that there is a blueprint, a really deep blueprint for how this stuff works which is very benevolent and very powerful and designed to lead us to wisdom once we get this. Sadly, it brings us so much pain until we get it. Carl Jung talked about why this is so and what he said was,

“We all have parts of ourselves that we don’t kind of know what to do with. Maybe we judge them, we’re ashamed of them.”

They’re really authentically us, but we feel awkward about them. And there’s so much about why we feel awkward about these parts, but I’ll just say a few reasons and this is a huge, huge subject. One reason is we weren’t taught to honor these parts of ourselves. These parts of ourselves are our genius and genius ain’t easy. The world is afraid of things that are too tender. The world is afraid of things that are too fierce. The world is afraid of things that are too original. Also, sometimes people milk us for these qualities, these gifts that we have. They see them and they take advantage of them and that’s also a traumatic experience. Another reason why is because these parts of ourselves are challenging to us. They’re kind of bigger or deeper than we are. So we don’t know what to do with them and it’s a life’s work learning to bear the humanity, the beauty, the radiance, the ferocity, the truth of these parts of ourselves.

What Swirls Around the Qualities You Hide

It’s not an easy thing. And the last reason, and I know there’s so much here, but it’s just, it’s such rich, rich content and such exciting stuff, but the last reason is because these parts of ourselves are so highly charged, we tend to make a lot of mistakes around them. We kind of have car crashes, our deepest immaturities swirl around our greatest gifts. So for example, let’s say you have a quality of a fierce love of truth, right? So you’ve got this quality where truth is really important to you in relationships. And you grow up in a family where it’s really important for people not to have the truth spoken.

You speak the truth and you get really punished for that. No one wants to hear it. You get told that there’s something wrong with you. You’re over-sensitive, you’re too much. You are hurting people’s feelings.

If you tell the truth to someone who’s a narcissist, a parent who’s a narcissist, you’re going to get in big, big trouble, if that truth doesn’t meet their emotional needs. When this occurs, we then go in one of two different directions essentially. We either suppress that part of ourselves which is not good. It’s an act of quiet violence against our being. So maybe you just don’t speak your truth and that’s not a good thing because it kind of burns inside of you.

Developing a Love Relationship With the Qualities You Hide

It might make you angry, it might make you withdrawn. It might make you avoid deep intimacy for fear of being hurt in the same ways. Or potentially, if you don’t suppress it, you might act it out – which is to express that truth in ways that are angry, holding the kind of build-up anger and strident qualities of a lifetime of having them pushed down. And so then when we act them out, we get in trouble too because we hurt people and we get hurt back. So these are just some of the different reasons why there’s such a scary charge around our deepest gifts. And now, not like you can get rid of these things, they’re there, but the key is to develop a love relationship with that core gift. To be able to see the beauty in it, to honor and name the gift underneath all of that hurt, underneath those bad experiences. And to be able to say there is a treasured gift here. That’s the beginning of an overthrow. That’s the beginning of a beautiful revolution of healing inside our being. And when you do that, you will watch your romantic life change in the most amazing, amazing ways. So in a minute, I’m going to help you identify a core gift in a place where you have been timid to reveal who you really are. We’re going to do that in a moment through a series of very kind of wonderful questions. But first, I just want to go back to Carl Jung and just explain how this connects to his work.

The Shadow

So Carl Jung said that there are these parts of ourselves that we’ve just talked about where we are ashamed or frightened to reveal these parts of ourselves. These then get suppressed and they become our shadow and that’s what he called “The Shadow.”

The shadow is the part of ourselves that we just don’t think is okay so we push it away.

And what he said is, all of that energy of that authentic self that we’re pressing down, ignoring, avoiding, not giving a vote at the voting table, denying will then turn into situations and relationships in our life that crushed us, that hurt us, that leave us feeling insecure. In other words, those shadow parts take on a kind of semi-monstrous form and attack us in our life. So in the land of dating, the qualities that are so deeply you that you don’t show, if you are ashamed of them, and if you suppress them, you will probably end up attracted to people who hurt you right in those very places. Jung talked about the need to embrace and integrate those shadow qualities. That’s just what we’re talking about here. Because the quality that you’re going to name in the next section of this episode is going to be a shadow quality which is a core gift and as you come to name it more deeply and love it more fully, it won’t be kind of attacking you from the outside. In fact, you’re going to be more likely to find people who treasure it. So let’s do this right now. I’m going to ask you some questions and I’d like you to think about your answer to each question.

Questions That Reveal the Qualities You Hide

I’m just going to pause a little bit after each question. If you want more time, absolutely pause this recording, write down your answers, think about your answers. Maybe you’re taking a walk or a run or you’re in the car and you could just take some time, pause it and then think. Or maybe you just want to take this kind of moment or two that I’m going to leave in between the questions and just see what comes up for you. But we’re going to do that right now. So I would like to ask you, what’s a part of your personality that you suppress or you feel hesitant or timid to reveal in your romantic life? Now, I am not talking about an incident that happened to you that might’ve been shameful or difficult or traumatic. I’m not talking about a part of your life that might be difficult to share. I’m talking about an attribute of your personality, a part of who you are, and I’m going to give you some different examples. For me, a quality that I tend to be ashamed of is an effusiveness of spirit. Like a love that feels really big that makes me silly and huge and demonstrative. I have shame and embarrassment around that. So in my love relationships, it’s work to be able to say, “I’m going to get behind that and celebrate that and be that.” Because there’s a kind of ring of fire of embarrassment that I feel.

The Different Needs That Suppress the Core Gifts

Another one is need. That’s another one for me when I have a feeling of need. When I want to lean into someone, when I have a need for whatever that is, that’s a shameful, embarrassing feeling. That’s one that I maybe hold back on. Some people have a fierceness of character that they are ashamed of showing. Some people have a need for a deep, deep sense of trust that they might be embarrassed to show. Some people might need a lot of communication and they feel embarrassed that their partner won’t be able to handle that. Some people need reassurance. Some people have a generosity that they don’t want to show because it’s been taken advantage of. Some people have a quality of needing distance and space. A kind of dignity and space that’s a real part of their being that they feel just isn’t romantic enough. I’m just giving a range of different examples. But I’d like you to think now about one part of your personality that you suppress or you feel hesitant or timid or ashamed to reveal when you really like someone, when you’re in a romantic relationship early on or even further into the relationship. Because I know for me those same qualities in my marriage, I’m still afraid to show my husband. It’s an ongoing, ongoing journey and when I’m doing my best, I show these things and I’m not ashamed. When I’m not doing as good, I suppress them and then I get defensive and prickly. So take a minute now to think about yours.

The Fake Kind of Defensive Self

Okay, next question. How do you behave with someone that you’re in a romantic relationship with or dating relationship with to suppress that part of you? Who do you become? What’s the false self that you become? Maybe it’s people pleasing, but in what way? Maybe it is just acting kind of more typical, not showing the depth of your need or your tenderness. Who’s that person, this kind of not so real person that you become to protect your true self? To not show that? To not get rejected? What’s the fake kind of defensive self that you create? It might not be super fake. It’s not like you’re a liar about who you are, but it’s not the deepest truth. It’s not showing your soul. And let me tell you, the difference between sort of showing who you are and really showing who you are is vast because sort of showing who you are often lacks energy. They say awkwardness is the compromise between impulse and inhibition. You want to show something, you inhibit it, but then you show a little of it. It’s going to be kind of awkward. It’s not going to have a lot of power. And when you really show it, there’s a generosity that can have a very powerful healing impact. So take a minute to think about this, what is the self that you create to not show the real part of you? Take a minute to think about that. Okay, so here’s an interesting question. How has life taught you that you’re not supposed to show that part of you? That this part of you is not wonderful, is not going to be treasured?

The Antidote Question to Unveil the Qualities You Hide

This is a huge question, but take a minute to just think about that. And now the antidote question, how do you feel when you’re with someone who respects and appreciates and treasures this part of you? Think about someone who has done that for you. Maybe not perfectly but pretty well, where to this day you could think about them and still feel good inside? Someone who has gotten the beauty of this part of you, with whom this part of you felt safe. Maybe there hasn’t been anyone. Then just imagine a person like that and what does it feel like? Or what do you imagine it would feel like or what has it felt like to be with someone who allows and gets and delights in this part of you? This is your future. That’s where you’re going. That is what you want. It’s where you’re going. So just imagine that, picture it or remember it. And now, I want you to think about that person who gets it, how would they describe it as a gift? How would they say or what have they said that they love about that part of you? Or just imagine someone who finally got that part of you even in its excesses, even in its immaturity, they still saw the beauty. Just imagine that. What would that person say the gift is here. And now, I’d like you to think about what the gift is, what the core gift is here, a love of truth, a tenderness of spirit, a deep, deep need to give, a deep need to receive.

What Is the Sole Gift

What for you is the gift here? Try to name it as a gift. You’ve spent so long having to see it as a curse or a burden or a strange part of you. Now you’re going to think, “What’s the sole gift here? What’s the gift?” Frame it and name it as a gift. Give that a try. It’s going to be a stretch, but try it and if any of you get stuck on this point, just go to deeperdatingpodcast.com and click on Ask Ken and you can leave me a question and I will help you be able to see what the gift is if you describe it. Last question. If you could honor and express this part of you with increasing generosity and wisdom and self-honoring, how would that lead you to deeper love and meaning in your life? If you actually treated this part of you as a gift, a treasure of your being, and expressed it in your romantic life and in your life, and then you started choosing people who also appreciated it, what would your life look like? Now, maybe you’re doing this work already, I’m sure to some degree you are, but picture it even more so. Picture a life where you’re embodying this part of you with even more bravery and compassion. That’s how you know where the gift lies. So what I would say to you is, this is a really big deal in your romantic life, in your dating life, in your sex life.

A Container for Deep Love

This is like a lever and the more you move this lever in the direction of knowing this is a gift, being only with people who don’t put you down for it, choosing those people, cultivating connection with them and living this gift more fully. The more you do that, the more you allow yourself to do that, the more love will work for you and I see this all the time in my intensives, in my course, in the letters that I get. The more you learn to treasure this attribute, to lead with it, to be this amazing you that you really are, the more you do that, the more your attractions will change, the more people you meet will be more people who can honor that. And in your relationships, the more you will be able to create healing, the less defensive you’ll be, the more truth-telling you’ll be, the more self honoring you’ll be and the more of a container for deep love you’ll be able to become. So this quality that you have been the most timid to reveal is actually nuclear and the more you own it and name it as a gift, the more your life will change and I’m dying to hear your stories.

Ask Ken

So do go to deeperdatingpodcast.com, click on Ask Ken and share your stories of what your experience is as you experiment with this. So thank you so much for listening. Give this a try, it’s deep and rich material and at the center of it, at the heart of it are your deepest gifts. Please feel free to share this with people who you think might appreciate it. You can go to deeperdatingpodcast.com to get each one of those questions so you could spend more time with them and I look forward to seeing you on the next episode of The Deeper Dating Podcast.

Jillian Richardson is the author of Unlonely Planet, and she’s all about helping you to finally find your people; your tribe. She believes that bringing people together is a sacred act, and in this delightful episode, Jillian teaches how everyone–at any age and in any circumstance (including social distancing)–can find a whole new order of deeper, more joyful community. This episode is filled with tools and tips to help you find your people–online and off. I’m thrilled to share her expertise and passion with you.

Episode Table of Contents

• Where Do You Find Your People and Your Tribe
• Find Your People Who Model the Life You Want
• Find Your People by Caring More for Other People
• The Different Flavors of Disconnection
• Find Your People Who Inspire You
• The Medium to Be Utilized to Find Your People
• Find Your People By Showing Up for Yourself

Episode Introduction: Find Your People

Sometimes no matter how busy we are, how connected we are, there can still be a sense of loneliness and emptiness. Jillian Richardson, author of Unlonely Planet, is going to be talking with me in this episode and helping each one of you find out how to discover and connect with your tribe, the people who really get who you are in the world. So stay tuned to this episode of the Deeper Dating Podcast. Hello everybody and welcome to the Deeper Dating podcast. I’m Ken Page and I’m a psychotherapist, author of the bestselling book, Deeper Dating, and your host. I’m so excited about today’s episode. I’m interviewing Jillian Richardson, author of Unlonely Planet. And Jillian is maybe the most wonderful person I know that helps people actually find their tribe in the world, to understand and honor feelings of loneliness and be able to change them in fun and exciting ways by helping people really find their community. This week and every week, I’m going to share the greatest tools I know and connect you with the greatest experts I know to help you find love and keep it flourishing and heal your life in the process because the skills of dating are nothing more than the skills of love and the skills of love are the greatest life skills of all. And if you want to learn more about the deeper dating path to real intimacy, just go to deeperdatingpodcast.com. And if you sign up for my mailing list, you’ll get free gifts and you’ll learn more about how to use these ideas to transform your intimacy journey.

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And you’ll also find a complete transcript of this and every episode there. And you’ll also get to hear about my new downloadable course where I guide people through the entire deeper dating journey. I just want to say that everything I’m going to be sharing in this podcast is educational in nature. It’s not medical or psychiatric advice or treatment of any sort. And if you’re experiencing serious psychological or psychiatric symptoms, please seek professional help. And by the way, if you like what you’re learning here, it would be a fabulous gift if you could subscribe and leave me a review. People have been leaving the most beautiful reviews and it just means the world to me and it helps me support this work. So thank you so much for that.

With no further ado, I want to tell you a little bit about Jillian Richardson and introduce her. Jillian is a professional community builder and facilitator. She’s the author of the Unlonely Planet, a book that I adore and I encourage all of you to purchase. She’s also most known for being the founder of The Joy List, a weekly newsletter on a mission to make the world less lonely. That’s an amazing, amazing list. I highly recommend people to subscribe to it. She’s been sending it out every Monday morning for almost four years in New York City.

Where Do You Find Your People and Your Tribe

Now, outside of The Joy List, she also runs online and in-person groups for people who want more connection in their lives. She consults with companies who want to create magical events. Overall, she’s passionate about creating spaces where people can drop their walls and be vulnerable. Nothing gets her more fired up than facilitating an emotional journey. I just want to tell you a little bit about my relationship with Jillian. When I discovered what Jillian was doing I was so excited because in my work as a therapist and as a coach with people who are looking for more intimacy and particularly people who are looking for relationships, I know how profoundly important it is that we face our loneliness and that we begin to find our tribe, our people. Jillian calls it our congregation as well. Having those people I think is the greatest definer of a rich and meaningful life. That’s what Jillian was all about, was helping people to do this. I was just thrilled because her healing, her vision, is a vision that the world forgets so many times in many ways. It’s a vision that she’s passionate about living. Kenneth Page: Welcome, Jillian Richardson. Jillian Richardson: Thank you so much for having me, Ken. Thank you for such a kind introduction. Not surprised, you’re really good at them. Kenneth Page: Well, it’s really true. I had been hungry for a teacher from my community that teaches this because I know that for me the center of my journey to find love began with this deep recognition of my loneliness that really hurt, but it was big and important to discover.

The Journey of Recognizing Loneliness and Finding Connection

Kenneth Page: I think a great way to start would be for you to tell us your story and your journey, and what was your loneliness, and your journey to both address that, find connection, and then teach other people to do that too. Tell us more. Jillian Richardson: Thank you! To start from the very beginning, I grew up in a family like a lot of people were my parents were not taught the skills from their parents for deep emotional connection. Growing up I didn’t have the language to describe how I was feeling. I just knew that while I love my parents I didn’t feel like my emotions were okay. I didn’t feel my anger, my sadness was okay. I didn’t feel very understood. I felt really shut down in my body. That was just so much my normal that I didn’t know any other way of living existed. I think a thing that I forget to appreciate about my life now is that the people who know how to really listen and really be present and be honest about their own experiences of the world, they’re very rare. Growing up I didn’t see that skill modeled around me. Again, I just did not know what was possible. There was just this longing that I had in me for something more that I was unconscious of. I was filling that hole with external things. When I was in college, I was doing a lot of comedy. A way that I cope is I can be a workaholic. I’m the president of my school’s comedy group. I’m writing for two of my colleges’ TV shows. I have a part-time job.

Taking the Opportunity to Change Your Life

Jillian Richardson: I’m learning how to become a personal trainer. I’m a spin instructor at my college. I’m doing all of these obsessive things. I have an eating disorder to avoid what I don’t even know is really going on with me. When I left college and moved to New York City in 2015, I took it as an opportunity to change my life. I knew that something wasn’t right. At first, I did all of the things that we’re taught to do to create friends. I was going to bars and shouting at people over loud music. I had my activity friends, like the people who I did comedy with where we would kind of joke with each other. Putting all of the onus on me, I wasn’t being true about my own struggles and what was really going on for me. I wasn’t creating the conditions for intimacy. I kind of had this moment of just reflecting on how many things I was doing at any given time. And still when I took a pause, how deeply unhappy I felt that I made a promise to myself that for a year I would try as many new things as I could. I was going to festivals alone, to retreats alone. Eventually, I found this experience called “Camp Grounded”, which is a Digital Detox summer camp for adults. That means no phones, no computers, no substances, no talk about work, no talk about age. All of my coping mechanisms were taken away from me. I just had to be present and playful with other adults.

Find Your People Who Model the Life You Want

Jillian Richardson: This sounds sad, but I genuinely believe it’s true. I had never been around adults who could do that before. It gave me a new model of what was possible. It gave me a new community in New York City and it just completely changed my perception of what I could do with my life, which is a huge point that I always try and drive home with why friendship is so important and the people we surround ourselves with is so crucial, is because the people who are around us are modeling the potential for our own lives. Kenneth Page: Beautiful. Jillian Richardson: If we’re around uninspiring people, we’re probably going to be living an uninspiring life ourselves. Kenneth Page: Yes, or struggling upstream every day. Jillian Richardson: Totally. Kenneth Page: I love that. I love that. I just acknowledge the point of facing the loneliness. It’s so funny how busyness covers loneliness. I relate to this so well because I know for me I was a gay man living in New York, looking for love is not like I wasn’t looking for intimacy, but I was looking in the wrong places and I was endlessly busy with my career and my kind of desperate search for love. I didn’t even have time to slow down enough to know how lonely I was. When I began a journey, also like you, of discovering places where I could learn and grow, for me it was a body-mind therapist training program. I began to face the loneliness.

The Beginning of a Good Life

Kenneth Page: I remember this one moment, I had seen kids on the beach or in the playground, if they got really hit by surprise, their mouths would just open up. They were so upset that a sound wouldn’t even come out. That was the feeling of my recognizing how deeply sadly lonely I was. Then, the tears just poured out. That was the beginning of my stopping just looking for love and trying to build it. That was the beginning of kind of what I think of as my good life. I just want to recognize that pivotal moment, that precious moment of saying, “I’m too lonely. I don’t have the connection I want yet.” Jillian Richardson: I think what you’re saying of kind of taking a pause is the only time when you can truly feel what’s going on inside. I think this moment in time that we’re in right now where the entire country in the world is on pause because of the Coronavirus. I think a lot of people are going to have realizations about the ways that they’re coping and if they’re working for them or not. Even just for me, I live in New York City. Again, as I said, a way that I cope is through being busy and working a lot and over-scheduling myself. Even just in the first two weeks of this, noticing how many Zoom calls I was getting on and how many virtual parties I was going to and just realizing, I’m doing the same thing to myself. To just take that pause and say, “Why am I so resistant to just being with myself?”

An Ongoing Excavation

Kenneth Page: That’s such a rich point. I could look at my life in some ways and say, “It’s so filled with love – my husband, my kids, my pets, my family,” but on a day-to-day level, I find the same thing. I keep covering that over with busyness. I just want to acknowledge the humbling truth you’re saying, which is that it’s an ongoing excavation. When you talked about what’s going on now in the world with COVID-19, I got chills, because here we all are, we have this built-in opportunity for a pause. I would love it if you could just talk to everybody who’s in this pause and help us understand how we can make the most of that. Jillian Richardson: I think a really great opportunity of this moment if people have the emotional capacity for it, and which a lot of people don’t, but if you do, is to just do the deeper emotional work that a lot of us put on the back burner because we don’t have time. That could look like reading books about Somatics and how your body is connected to your emotions. I really recommend the book, The Body Keeps the Score, by Bessel van der Kolk. I quote it in my book a lot. It’s a really powerful example of how our bodies can trap trauma and how our bodies can react in ways that we don’t even understand are connected to our emotions. Also, looking at how our family systems have influenced the ways that we cope as adults. For me, I had my big kind of year of just really diving into my own family psychology.

Find Your People by Caring More for Other People

Jillian Richardson: I read The Body Keeps the Score. I also read The Drama of the Gifted Child. I kind of joke that people who read that book need a support group because it is a heavy book. It made me personally realize how I will create a mask of an achiever, a perfectionist, of a good girl, of someone who wants everyone to like her. My boundaries are your boundaries. Pushing myself to care for other people and not taking care of myself kind of having lots of shallow relationships versus really committing to a few deeper relationships and just seeing all of these patterns in my own personal life and realizing how deeply tied they are to my relationship with my family, and realizing if I don’t work on my relationship with my family, even just within myself of healing those wounds, I’m not going to be able to overcome these patterns and I’m not going to feel less lonely no matter how many incredible people I bring into my life because I don’t even fundamentally believe that I deserve this love or intimacy in the first place. Kenneth Page: So you’re talking about a kind of powerful task that people can do during this pause which is to actually look at their family of origin and the patterns that emerge that they still might be stuck in and you recommended two wonderful books. Tell us more ideas. Maybe, some people don’t want to touch that stuff. Maybe, they’re not readers. Jillian Richardson: That’s totally understandable.

Taking a Much Needed Pause

Kenneth Page: I think it’s glorious. You’re starting right at the basis. For those people that maybe don’t want to do that, what are some other things that they could do to press the pause, feel what’s underneath, reexamine their lives, and use this pause to deepen their journey toward connection? Jillian Richardson: Another activity that I would recommend is to do some journaling on who the current people are in your life that are in your circle. If you were to write down the names of your closest friends and the people who you spend the most time with in your life and reflect on, “What is it about this relationship that I really like? What is it about this relationship that I don’t necessarily like?” I think it takes a pause like this for people to look at their relationships with a microscope and say, “Wow, the people I spend the most time with, I actually don’t even like that much.” If you’re one of those people, I am not saying this with judgment whatsoever, because I’m in conversations with people a lot around their experiences of loneliness. It is very common for people to just hold on to relationships and friendships because of history together. That could look like, “Well, we went to college together,” or, “We grew up together,” or, “We have the same job, and so we just hang out after work,” whatever it is. To think about if you could either take some time to improve that relationship, to perhaps learn some skills yourself and this is probably a separate point, but to learn some skills yourself for communicating better with that person, having deeper conversations with them, being a better listener to them.

Questions to Guide You as You Find Your People

Jillian Richardson: Or if you want to be a little more brutal with yourself, or if this is true for you, and say, “Actually, this relationship is very draining to me. When I’m in a relationship with this person, I feel less energized versus more energized, most of the time, if not all of the time.” If that’s true for you, then to reflect on, “When this pause is over and I can reemerge into the world again, what does my ideal community look like? Who are the types of people I want to surround myself with? What type of friends do I want to be to them? How do I want them to support me?” Because it’s a thing that people kind of just let happen to them a lot of the time. I know that was true for me, where it was just, “Okay, these are the people who are in my life. They’re here, we’re spending time together. Why would I try and find somebody different?” When in reality, these people can, I don’t that like the word, “up level,” but they can bring so much more joy and life into your existence. Kenneth Page: So much to say about that. That’s so important and dense. It’s hard and real and important stuff. I was just thinking about a dear friend of mine who underwent surgery. After surgery, she was very, very vulnerable. She had this thing where she wouldn’t let people visit her who drained her. In her normal life, very resilient, very empowered. She handled that. But, in her post-surgery period, she had a revelation, which was some people drain her and that she actually had a right to honor that.

The Different Flavors of Disconnection

Kenneth Page: I love what you’re saying. That’s a rich, rich thing to think about. In which of those relationships can you fix that, can you change that? I believe it’s in Episode 64, I actually teach a concept called the Aha Process, which is a wonderful way to kind of deepen and heal relationships. Just one other thing I want to say is that this pause concept is so rich. If bubble baths are your thing, or meditation is your thing or doing YouTube yoga sessions, all of these things, now is the time for that. And I love your idea of journaling, Jillian. I think that’s so important and so rich. You mentioned to me before we started this recording that you actually had a series of questions that you’d like to ask people. Would this be a good time for that? Jillian Richardson: Yes. Totally. Actually, I have them pulled up on my computer. Kenneth Page: Great. Jillian Richardson: These are questions that, for a while, I was making social calendars for people in New York City, where they would fill out a questionnaire and I would custom-make a list of suggestions of events that they could attend to meet people in the city. Kenneth Page: So great. Jillian Richardson: It more than anything, it was just a really great way for me to get insight into all the different flavors of disconnection that exist in New York City. Kenneth Page: So well said.

A Busted Myth Regarding Disconnection

Jillian Richardson: One side-point that I want to make before I read these questions is, the first two people who signed up for this service after I posted it were both people who were in committed romantic relationships, which at that time shocked me. Because one of my wounds is that I really craved a romantic relationship growing up. I really thought that if I have this person then everything will be great. And so to hear, “Wow, these people are in a really long-term relationship and they feel lonely. What does that say?” It’s saying that you can feel disconnected no matter what it looks like from the outside looking in. You can struggle with finding friends even if you’re married or dating someone. That gave me a lot of really great context. It felt like a myth was busted for myself. Kenneth Page: So important. So important. Also, so many married folks, you don’t get all your needs met, including deep and important needs that do need to be met. This is this thing that it’s not going to be a lover or a husband or a wife or a partner that’s going to meet all your needs, they’re a glorious, glorious, glorious place of fruition of intimacy, but we need our friends. If we have family we can connect to, we need our family. We need our pets. We need our relationship to nature. We are so multi-faceted and that’s just so important. Jillian Richardson: Amen. With these people, I asked them these 10 questions. Kenneth Page: 10 questions. Great. Jillian Richardson: It’s 10. If you want, I can read a handful of them or all of them.

The Precious Questions About Connectedness

Kenneth Page: Whatever you think is best. I’m very excited to hear them. Jillian Richardson: I’ll read a handful of them. Kenneth Page: Sure. Jillian Richardson: The questions, they’re about finding your friends, but also just finding the events and the gatherings where you might find your friends. Kenneth Page: Great. Jillian, I’m just going to say one thing here for the listeners. I would love you to consider at this point, maybe getting a paper and a pen if you want. If you’re walking and you want to answer these questions out loud, you could do that. If you want to stop and get a paper and a pen. But to pause as long as you like after each one of her questions to really let yourself formulate your answer because these are really precious questions. Jillian Richardson: Thank you. The first question, and I think this might be my favorite question, is when in your life have you truly felt like you belonged? What was it about that time that made you feel that way? Kenneth Page: Oh my god, that’s so beautiful. I have chills hearing that question. I want to encourage people to take a minute pause and answer that. Jillian Richardson: I run an online group that I ask that question to and I get to hear people’s answers. It’s a question a lot of people really struggle to answer. If that’s the case for you, that’s completely okay. It’s a great way to reflect on, “Wow, that time in my life when I went to summer camp when I was a teenager. What was it about that summer camp that made me feel so included?” You just get those wheels turning. That’s one question.

Find Your People Who Inspire You

Jillian Richardson: Some other kind of less meta-questions are what areas of your city inspire you that you want to spend more time in? Also, what skills do you want to develop? Kenneth Page: These are wonderful questions. Jillian Richardson: Thank you. How do you want to improve as a person in the next 12 months? These questions are really just to kind of make the tie between the people who are around you can help you with all of these things. If someone says, “I feel really disconnected from my body, and I’ve always wanted to feel comfortable going out dancing.” If a woman said that to me, I’d say, “Well, how about you find a group for only women who danced together?” Because that’s probably a good first step, and to be around women who are comfortable in their skin, so that you can see what’s possible for yourself. Because going to a women’s only dance party is going to be far better for that person and more inspiring and uplifting for that person than just going to a nightclub or a bar and dancing. It’s about being around people who are shifting your perception of what is possible. Kenneth Page: And that’s your point again about how important it is to surround yourself with people who inspire you, help you be the you that you want to be. That’s something you keep coming to and I so love. Jillian Richardson: Thank you. I appreciate that. I think one more question that I’ll add because I think it ties into really beautifully of how you often talk about people’s gifts, Ken, and how those gifts can be really tied to things that people don’t necessarily like about themselves. Kenneth Page: Yes.

Defining Your Personal Struggles

Jillian Richardson: A question I ask people is, what’s your biggest struggle right now? With the woman who might be uncomfortable in her skin, if that’s her biggest struggle, being in groups of women who are really sexually empowered and comfortable in their bodies will be such a huge benefit. A lot of people don’t necessarily connect what they’re struggling with, with their friendships, but they can be really complimentary. Kenneth Page: I love this. I love this. You’re laying out a framework for what everybody could do. You’re talking about people taking a pause. Then, you’re talking about people answering questions that really help them think about when they have felt gratified, when they have felt a deep sense of connection, when they haven’t, with whom do they feel that sense of connection, all of these questions. And then, also, what do they long for? These are just such fabulous pause period questions for people to reflect on. Now, I’d like to ask you kind of a next step question with two parts. The next step is, then what do you do to find that? Especially if you’re living in an urban area or if you’re living not in an urban area, including you’re far away or you’re older and you have a hard time getting around. That’s question number one. Like, what do you do to find these events? And number two, what do you do now while you’re sheltered at home, if you’re sheltered at home? Anybody who has a hard time getting out and getting connected, how can we use the online world? What can we do? Just anything you want to say about these next steps in creating this life that you teach we can have.

Find Your People Through Virtual Events

Jillian Richardson: I think in terms of online events and what’s possible, the easiest suggestion for me is that my newsletter, The Joy List, actually is only featuring virtual events right now. They are events hosted in the online space that anyone anywhere can attend. Kenneth Page: Love that. Love that. Yes. Huge, huge, important. Jillian Richardson: That makes it very easy. Kenneth Page: Everybody should subscribe then. Jillian Richardson: Yes. I think for the foreseeable months as most people are in social isolation and distancing themselves, we don’t know when this is going to end. I’ve made the commitment to include events that anyone can attend from anywhere for the foreseeable future. Kenneth Page: I love that. That’s gold. Thank you so much. Yes. Jillian Richardson: Of course. It has made me so happy to see how many community builders all around the world are taking this time to do partnerships that were never possible before. To reach more people than they ever could have reached before. Just to say, “The ecstatic dance that happens in San Francisco, suddenly, I can be there. I’m going to be there with 500 people, and we’re all dancing from home.” It’s different, but it’s really beautiful. Kenneth Page: Wonderful. Jillian Richardson: That’s one very easy way to do that. Outside of the virtual events, I also have some really quick tips for finding in-person events when all of this is over. A very simple one is on Eventbrite – eventbrite.com which features ticketed events. There is a filter called community. When you’re searching for events, say, you’re looking for events on June 3rd in your town, you can also put on the filter of Community Events.

A Facilitated Connection

Jillian Richardson: I typically find that events that are tagged, either community or spirituality tend to be the best for facilitated connection. The reason that I talk about facilitated connection is because that’s what has helped me find friends at events. I’m an extroverted person. I’m great at starting conversations with people. And even for me, to walk into a big networking event or a big party and to just start talking to people feels very daunting. It doesn’t feel natural. The connection can feel kind of forced. Instead, to have a facilitator there who says, “We’re going to get you partnered up with this person. You’re each going to ask each other this question for five minutes,” I just feel so deeply relieved. That’s why in my newsletter I only feature events that have facilitated connection. Because it’s taking the pressure off of people and giving them a way to have permission to go a little bit deeper with others. Kenneth Page: I love that. I love that because I think so many people think, “God, what’s wrong with me? I need to be able to do this.” But just the difference between those two scenarios you described, it’s just a world of difference. I just think that’s a beautiful, beautiful key. That’s great. Jillian Richardson: Thank you. The same thing also applies for Facebook. If you have Facebook, when you go to the “Events” tab on the left-hand side, there is a discovery feature where you just simply hit “Discover”, you choose the dates that you want to find events for. And a helpful element of this feature is you can see events that your friends have expressed that they’re going to, or they are interested in. Kenneth Page: Nice.

The Medium to Be Utilized to Find Your People

Jillian Richardson: For me in New York City, I might be like, “I don’t know what’s going on next Saturday.” Suddenly I’ll see, “Well, 10 people I know are going to this cuddle party, or this yoga class, or this movie screening and discussion.” For a lot of people, that helps kind of ease the fear of showing up, is to see that someone you know will be there already. Kenneth Page: I love that. I love that. In all of my teaching, I tell people that the best, best way to meet a partner is at events where there are other people who share your values. Events that kind of touch you deeply, touch your deepest values, excite you the most because you’ll be shining there. And that’s true, you’ll be glowing. That glow is going to be true with making friends, with finding a partner. And what you’re saying in a certain way is that the medium of meeting is hugely important. And you’re recommending media of meeting, ways of meeting, that are warm, safe, structured, connected, and joyful. Jillian Richardson: Completely. Very well put. Thank you. Kenneth Page: I love that. I love that. Could you say something Jillian to all the people that are listening and thinking, “Well, conceptually, this is really good but ouch, I don’t want to have to go out there. It’s so hard. It’s hard. It’s embarrassing. It’s awkward. I know I have to. I know I should.” Any words of encouragement or just suggestions or anything to help all of us who feel just a little bit held back around taking these brave steps?

Posting Your Interests Attracts the Right People in Your Tribe

Jillian Richardson: Completely. I think the first thing that’s really important for people to know if you’re feeling, ” I don’t want to be a burden to people,” or, “Everyone else already has enough friends, I don’t want to reach out,” is just to give some data. One number that I always love sharing is that the average American has one close friend and 75% of Americans are not satisfied with their friendships. Which means that most of us have one friend and most of us don’t even like that friend, which is a total bummer. But at the same time it really emphasizes and highlights how if you’re asking people to spend time with you, chances are you are giving them a huge gift by doing that. Kenneth Page: Yes. Jillian Richardson: Even if you reach out to someone and say, “Hey, I’m going to this movie screening. I think it’d be really fun. I would love for you to join me. I’d love to spend some time with you”. Even if they can’t make it, I know nobody in the world who would read that message and think, “It’s so annoying that this person reached out to me and wants to spend time with me.” Everyone wants to be thought of. Everyone wants to be invited. Another tip that I give people a lot, which for me I will own, can be easier because I do this a lot, but I think it’s really, really helpful is, if you have social media and if you’re comfortable doing this, to just publicly say what type of person you’re interested in connecting with right now.

Find Your People and See How It Can Change Your Life

Jillian Richardson: This is also very helpful if you’re moving to a new place. Even if you’ve lived in your city for years, you can say, “Hey, friends in (insert your city here), I’m interested in meeting people who are interested in (insert your interests here). Who do you have for me?” Kenneth Page: I love it. Jillian Richardson: This is a really simple idea because people love to help. And on social media, just tagging someone in a post takes literally two seconds. Ken, if you said, “Hey, New York City. I’m interested in meeting people who are therapists, who work in the relationship space.” It’s very easy for me to go and tag a friend of mine in that post and it’s up to them if they want to connect with you or not. Kenneth Page: I love it. Jillian Richardson: Chances are you’re going to have a lot of people to suddenly connect with just because you were brave enough to post. Kenneth Page: What happens to people who take these steps? How, kind of from the inside do their lives change when they increase the number of wonderful spaces they have and deeper connections? How do people’s lives change when they have that? When they do that? Jillian Richardson: Great question. I would say, one, the most important thing to me of how people’s lives change is that, by consistently showing up in these spaces and by consistently looking for really wonderful people in your life, you are proving to yourself that you are worth love, and care, and connection.

Find Your People By Showing Up for Yourself

Jillian Richardson: It’s just like if you are showing up to exercise, or you’re showing up and making really beautiful meals for yourself. You’re signaling to your body that I am worth caring for, and I am safe, and I am supported. It’s improving your self-esteem. By doing these things, your self-esteem will improve or at least this is what I’ve seen with myself and people who I work with. Also, you just have things to look forward to. When you have things to look forward to, the amount of joy in your life is increasing because you can look at your calendar and say, “Wow, this week I’m going to my women’s circle. I’m going to a really great yoga class followed by a discussion. I’m going to a sober dance party.” Whatever it is, you’re saying, “Wow, there’s a lot of really incredible stuff.” And it’s going to be far easier for you to connect with people. Because when someone says, “What’s going on? What are you looking forward to?” Suddenly, you can become the person who’s saying, “There’s this great thing I’m going to and here’s why I love it. If you want to join me, that’d be great.” Speaking as someone who went from being in New York City not feeling connected, not knowing where to go to find really good, heartfelt connections to suddenly becoming the person who everyone is asking for recommendations, it just becomes so much simpler to have deeper connections with people because we’re going to spaces where deeper connections are literally facilitated. That’s the point of the space that we’re going to in the first place.

Connect With Jillian

Kenneth Page: Gorgeous, gorgeous. I just want to encourage everyone who’s listening, and you’re going to get to hear about how to do this in just a few moments, to join The Joy List, because it’s virtual, it’s everywhere. In addition to finding these events, Jillian’s work is going to spark you thinking in new ways and in new directions. “That’s pretty cool. I’d like to do something a little bit different, like such and such. Let me search out where that is.” Her list will just spark so many new ideas for you. Kenneth Page: Jillian, in a minute I’m going to ask you to tell people how they could get in touch with you. Right now, could you tell them the website to go to so that they could subscribe to The Joy List? Jillian Richardson: Yes. The website for The Joy List is joylist.nyc. Kenneth Page: Beautiful. Remember folks, it’s not just NYC. Now, at this point, it’s everywhere in the world which is fabulous. Jillian Richardson: Yes. Kenneth Page: Jillian, your work touches me deeply because nobody’s talking about this. Deep, deep, deep within our beings, there’s such a hurt, there’s such a wounding, there’s such an emptiness that comes from a kind of endemic loneliness that we don’t even recognize. What your mission is about is healing that, recognizing it, changing it, and helping the world at the same time. Do you have any last thoughts that you want to share with this community?

Final Thoughts on Loneliness

Jillian Richardson: I think the last thing that I’ll leave people with is just, if you are lonely, you are not alone. There are tons of steps that you can take to feel more connected. Shame is not a helpful emotion. If you’re feeling shame around your loneliness, just know that your experience is really common and there’s probably a ton of people around you who are feeling exactly the same way but they’re just not brave enough to either look at it or to admit it. Kenneth Page: Beautiful. Thank you, Jillian. Now, can you give us the full picture of how people can connect with you, learn from you, and what you offer? Jillian Richardson: Yes. Thank you. The easiest thing to do is to buy my book. It’s called Unlonely Planet. You can find it on Amazon. If you’re looking to do some deeper work, I have one current offering and two where you can reach out to me and we can figure it out one-on-one. One is, I offer an online program called Four Weeks to Find Your People. Kenneth Page: Love that. Jillian Richardson: Thank you. If you go to The Joy List website, there’ll be a signup form for that. I also have my wait list open for my online course. If you’re someone who doing a program with a group right now feels kind of scary or you don’t want to commit to that, you can do the online program at your own pace. Jillian Richardson: Lastly, I offer one-on-one coaching. If you reach out to me at hey@joylist.nyc which is my email address and mention that you found me through Deeper Dating, I will give you a special gift.

Jillian’s Social Handles

Kenneth Page: Beautiful, beautiful. Tell us about your social media handles. Jillian Richardson: Yes, the social media handles, on Instagram, I am either @thatjillian, J-I-L-L-I-A-N. That’s also my handle on Twitter, it is @thatjillian. If you’re looking to follow The Joy List, we are The Joy List on Facebook and @joylistnyc on Instagram. Kenneth Page: Beautiful, beautiful. Did I leave anything out? Jillian Richardson: Did you leave anything out? I guess, if you want to learn just about me as a person, my personal website, no surprise, is thatjillian.com. Kenneth Page: Fantastic, fantastic. Folks, I’m so excited by these messages. I just know, you know Anthony Robbins says, “Show me the five people you’re closest to and I’ll show you the quality of your life.” It’s just so true. Jillian, your message is a message of nourishment and healing that the world desperately needs. It’s also a message of fun and joy which we all, especially these days, really need. Thank you so much for being on the show. Jillian Richardson: Thank you, Ken. Kenneth Page: Take care, everybody. I look forward to seeing you on the next episode of the Deeper Dating Podcast. If this episode has meaning for anybody in your life, please share this with them because I think so many people will benefit from this. If you want, you can also go to deeperdatingpodcast.com and sign up for my mailing list and get a free gift and learn about all the work and the programs that I’m doing as well. Kenneth Page: Jillian, what a joy. I’ve waited so long to have this interview with you. Jillian Richardson: Thank you. Kenneth Page: Thank you. Take care, everyone.

All of us have a false self, created to protect us as we move through life. That false self has no true personal power. When we rely on it, we feel like we’re climbing a wobbly ladder. This episode teaches how you can stop relying on your false self and reclaim your true self, where your real power, ingenuity, and deepest truth lie. It is the key to an empowered and intimate life. Living from our true self is life’s greatest adventure!

Table of Contents

• Using Your False Self as a Defensive Structure
• My People-Pleaser False Self
• Understanding and Naming Our False Self

Episode Introduction: False Self

I think that maybe the greatest key to a rich and love-filled life is learning to discover our true self and separate it from our false self. In this episode of the Deeper Dating Podcast, you’ll learn how to identify your true self and your false self, and liberate your true self in your relationships and in your life, so stay tuned. Hello, everybody, and welcome to The Deeper Dating Podcast. I’m Ken Page, and I’m a psychotherapist and the author of the bestselling book Deeper Dating, and I’m the host of this podcast. Today, I’m going to be speaking about how to identify your true self and separate it from your false self in your interactions with the world and with yourself. Every week, I’m going to share the greatest tools that I know to help you find love and grow love and heal your life in the process because the skills of true dating are nothing more than the skills of intimacy, and the skills of intimacy are the greatest skills of all. And if you want to learn more about the Deeper Dating path to real intimacy, just go to deeperdatingpodcast.com. You can sign up for my mailing list and get some wonderful free gifts and learn more about how to use these ideas to transform your entire intimacy journey. You’ll also find a complete transcript of this episode and all the other episodes. And you’ll also find my new downloadable Deeper Dating Course. I’ve put in a lot of time, and a lot of love, and a lot of heart into creating an audio and some video course with workbooks that captures kind of the essence of the entire journey that I teach here. So you can find out more about that on my website.

Subscribe and Leave Ken a Review

Also I want to say that everything I share in this podcast is educational in nature. It’s not psychiatric or medical advice or treatment of any condition. If you think you need help around emotional issues, I so encourage you to get yourself that kind of professional help and support. Finally, thank you for the beautiful, amazing reviews that I’ve gotten. I appreciate it incredibly. If you like what you’re hearing here and you haven’t left a review yet, it would just be so wonderful if you could subscribe and leave a review on whatever platform you listen to this on. So thank you so much for your patience, and now we’re going to jump in. So all of us create a false self to protect our true self when it feels too frightening to be genuine in the world. What happens is when our false self becomes dominant, it begins to bury the very qualities that it was originally designed to protect. And those buried qualities, which I call our core gifts, hold the key to deeper love, to our creativity and to the deepest meaning in our lives. So how can we free them? That’s what we’re going to be talking about in this episode. We’re going to talk about the process of rediscovering and gradually liberating these challenging but life-changing aspects of our true selves, our core gifts. I speak about them in much greater detail in my course Deeper Dating, and in my book Deeper Dating. But in my years, my many years, as a psychotherapist, I really have become more and more profoundly convinced that these parts of ourselves hold the missing link in so many cases to our search for love and a richer, more meaningful life.

Using Your False Self as a Defensive Structure

The great psychoanalytic theorist D.W. Winnicott used this term “false self” to describe the kind of defensive structure that a young person has to create when usually his or her mother but his or her parent can’t respond to him or her with empathy and care. And no parent’s perfect but if this kind of lack of parental empathy is chronic, the child is forced to create a false self that’s designed to meet the parents’ needs, not their own.

And the more that this child comes to feel that their true self is not appreciated, is not delighted in, is not cherished, and is not dignified, the more the false self has to become dominant.

Winnicott describes this kind of terrible poverty of inner life that occurs as our false self gets bigger and takes up more and more space as a loss of our innate vitality, and joy, and creativity. So we all need to create a false self, and we all do create a false self just to smooth the waters of our day-to-day life at the very least. But when we get too dependent on the crutches of our false self, we lose the spark of our deepest and most unique personal gifts. We lose the spark that is so essentially us and nobody else. It’s our soul. It’s our core gifts. And these gifts of our true self are often not easy, they challenge us. They challenge other people. And how could they be easy? Because as I say, they’re our genius, and genius domesticated is genius lost.

The Cost of Depending on Your False Self

These parts of us hold our greatest yearning. They hold our riskiest, juiciest thoughts and ideas, and they hold our most essential vulnerability, our most profound needs, our wildest joys, our deepest hurts, our secret story. So our true self is really challenging in its power, its tenderness, and its originality. And unless we are taught to name and understand this true self part of us, our core gifts, what I call our core gifts, until we learn how to work with their force and their vulnerability, we lose our link to them. Then we rely more and more on our false selves to get us through and we become more and more uncomfortable with our true selves. More and more there’s this ring of fire that we would have to step through; shame, embarrassment, vulnerability to cross over into our true self. When that happens, we lose our ability to play, to create, and to love. Kierkegaard said this amazingly. It’s very moving. He said,

“The deepest form of despair is to choose to be another than himself. “

So powerful. And just to share a story….. a number of years ago, I was in a position where I had committed to way too many things, which I’m really prone to do. I found myself trapped in this kind of web of obligations and demands that just felt impossible to reconcile or carry. But I had to do every one of them, I felt. And it felt like I was just being completely crowded out of my good life, that good life that I remembered, and there were no options.

Taking a Chance on God

I had a mentor at the time, whose name was John McNeill, I’ve done some writing about him, and he was a hero of mine. He was a Jesuit priest who was kicked out of the Jesuit order by Benedict, who then became the Pope. He wrote a book. He wrote a number of books that are just amazing about the journey toward authenticity and true spirituality. One book that I love deeply is Taking a Chance on God. And I actually wrote the forward to his last book, which is called Sex as God Intended. Anyway, he was my spiritual advisor. So in my meeting with him, I told him about what was going on for me and he said something that was very surprising. It wasn’t what I expected, but it really shed very intriguing light on this whole situation. So he said, “Ken, I somehow feel that you don’t have enough access to your true self in this situation.” So he asked me, “Can you see if you could find your true self in this situation and also identify your false self?” So I knew about this concept, of course, but I had never been bluntly asked to do it myself. So we’re all going to be doing that today in this episode. I’m going to ask you to do some work with this, to discover the preciousness of your true self and the importance of understanding your false self. Anyway, so I did it, and my answer was clear. It was scary and beautifully clear. I had been putting my obligations way ahead of my well-being.

My People-Pleaser False Self

My people-pleasing tendency had ascendancy and the part of me that wanted to breathe and needed to breathe was being crushed. My obligations had become senior to my authentic self, my true self. My false self wouldn’t let me say no without terrible guilt. My true self felt trapped and just yearned to take a stand, but my false self would not allow it. The fear was too great that I’d be irresponsible, that I’d be an irresponsible person, that I would hurt other people, that people would be angry at me, that people would reject me, that I would look really bad. So I buried my true self because it was too dangerous, and I didn’t have access to that true self. And without access to my true self, I had no power. I didn’t have the power to get out of this quicksand I had created for myself because my inner strength, which was my true self, was buried, and my people-pleaser false self that I had learned to rely on just was not strong enough to handle the challenge of my life at that time.

This is what happens, when we lead with our false self, we will always feel inadequate. There’ll be a terrible cycle of having to prove.

And God knows when we’re in a position where we’re coming to the world or relationships from a place of having to prove, there’s going to be a lot of pain. That feeling of inadequacy is going to just haunt us and chase us because our false self is inadequate. It does not have link to our personal genius or our personal power.

Identifying True Self From the False Self

And when we rely on it, it’s like climbing a wobbly ladder. We’re always going to be afraid of being toppled. We won’t feel solid in the truth of who we are. So John asked me to do that. And just naming and valuing my true self gave me the courage to make some really hard phone calls, which I couldn’t have done if I didn’t identify my true self and my false self. I pulled back from a lot of things. I extended some deadlines and people were wonderful. They were fine. I was living under this guard at the gate that was not about them and not about reality. It was about such a terror of doing wrong or being wrong that it had just ascendancy over my true self, which said, “I like breathing.” So before I talked with John, it would’ve been impossible for me to do what I did. After I talked to him, I was able to do it and breathe again. Simply naming my true self and my false self was enough to change my whole view of things. When the pressure was lifted, my good life came back. And like most of us, I’m happiest when I can breathe, when I can reflect, when I can enjoy my loved ones. But again and again, these parts of me encroach on that. The false self that always is trying to prove my worth, or maybe more specifically disprove my unworthiness, constantly buries me in an avalanche of obligations.

Establishing a Current Relationship With Your True Self

The truth is that willpower is insufficient to change that dynamic. What it requires is a current relationship with my true self, with the part of me that values a full life more than values proving to people that I’m worthy. So, now, I’m going to invite you to ask yourself the same question that John McNeill asked me. Now, I’d like you to take a minute, you can pause this if you like, and think about an aspect of your life which is causing concern for you, causing problems, causing worry, a place where you’re kind of losing yourself and you don’t know how to be. And just, we hold this with cupped hands. We give it space. We don’t judge it. Then, I want to ask you three questions. In this situation, what aspects of your true self have you been frightened to fully claim and express? Now, they may be immature, they may be imperfect, they may be unripe, but we need to start out by giving them freedom. So what are the parts of your true self? What’s the voice of your true self here if you weren’t going to worry about what people think? Next question. What is the false self that you created to hide this true self? Think about that false self that you’ve created and en wrap the true self in to make life easier, to make life safer. Now, thinking about your true self, can you name that part of you as a gift? Can you think of it as a core gift?

Recognizing the Gifts of True Self

Take a minute to think about how that true self is a gift. What are the qualities it has that are precious? Compassion, fierceness, self-care, generosity, clarity, direction. Take a minute to see and name the gift in your true self. And imagine, now, what would it be like to come from your true self in a balanced way. As they say, say what you mean, mean what you say, and don’t say it mean. Just imagine what it would be like to do that in this situation. As you reflect on what it might look like to engage your true self here, just remember that it takes time and patience to develop the skills to handle the heat and the power of our core gifts. Until we learn those skills, we’re going to tend to either suppress the power of our true self or express it in ways that are maybe a little strident, a little rough, a little harsh, a little unintegrated. That’s how we learn. But when we ask ourselves, “How can I own this true self? And then how can I express it with care for the world at the same time?” we’re in our growing place. Here’s another thing, too, it’s really important to remember that our core gifts, our true self can tell how committed we are to really protecting and honoring it. And as much as we may try to rouse our true self out of hiding, it won’t come out until it knows we have its back. The false self is unbelievably strong because it’s forged out of a need to survive.

Understanding and Naming Our False Self

Winnicott said in one of the most poignant, poignant concepts, he said that the need to protect our true self is so great that some of us actually choose death over a threat to that self. So the key to healing any old hypnosis is through a current relationship with a better reality. So if we want to liberate our true self, it’s essential that we build a loving relationship with it, that we learn how to get a kick out of it, and that we learn how to call it a gift and see how these aspects do reflect some of our deepest, truest life mission DNA gifts. It’s also essential that we find, and create, and build relationships with the people who are capable of honoring those qualities in us. That is like one of the absolute greatest keys to a happy life. And in your search for love, that’s what I invite you to look for, centrally and primarily. Watch how that changes your world because it does and it will. So discovering and reclaiming our true self and understanding and naming our false self is one of the greatest adventures in our life. So I’d love to hear any of your thoughts and reflections. You can go to deeperdatingpodcast.com and just click on Ask Ken and share anything you want about these ideas. Also, I really encourage you to go to that website and sign up for my mailing list so that you can become a part of my learning community. So thank you so much for listening, and I’ll see you in the next episode of The Deeper Dating Podcast.

These 3 steps to resolving the conflicts in your life have the power to deepen all of your intimate relationships, including your relationship with yourself. Each of these three steps leads to a deeper state of authenticity; to a gentle, skillful “overthrow” of the inner and outer voices which hold us back from deeper love.

Table of Contents

• Resolving the Conflicts Lead to Greater Authenticity
• Resolving the Conflicts by Honoring Our Feelings
• The Key Point When It Comes to Resolving the Conflicts

Episode Introduction: Resolving the Conflicts

If you’re experiencing conflicts of any sort, there’s a three-step process that will get you through that conflict and take you out to the other side with a much greater sense of self-love, knowledge, and connectedness. Stay tuned to the Deeper Dating Podcast to learn this wonderful technique. Hello and welcome to the Deeper Dating Podcast. I’m Ken Page, and I’m a psychotherapist and a coach and the author of the bestselling book, Deeper Dating: How to Drop the Games of Seduction and Discover the Power of Intimacy. I’m excited about our podcast today because I’m going to be talking about a three-step process to resolve conflict with other people or within yourself. Every week, I’m going to share with you the greatest tools that I know to help you find love and keep it flourishing and heal your life in the process, because the skills of dating are nothing more than the skills of love and the skills of love, including self-love are the greatest skills of all for a happy life. And if you want to learn more about the Deeper Dating path to real intimacy, just go to deeperdatingpodcast.com. You can sign up for my mailing list and get free gifts and learn more about how to use these ideas to transform your own intimacy journey. And I’m thrilled to announce that now on the website you can also find out about a very in-depth, very rich downloadable online course that I’ve just created. And you’ll also find a complete transcript of this and every episode on the website.

Subscribe and Leave Ken a Review

Also, I just want to say that everything I share in this podcast is educational in nature. It’s not medical or psychiatric advice or treatment. If you like what you’re learning here, I would really appreciate it if you could subscribe, leave me a review, and share information about the podcast with other people who might be interested in it. So thank you so much for that and let’s jump in.

This is a wonderful process to resolve conflict through deeper self-honoring, and honoring of others as well. So many of us struggle on different levels with intimacy and learning this simple skill is one of the greatest gifts that we can give ourselves and give those we love.

This technique that I’m going to teach is designed to deepen all of your intimate relationships, including your relationship with yourself. Every one of its three steps will lead you to greater authenticity and victory over the inner and outer voices that hold you back from deeper love. The process is called the AHA process and it’s an acronym that will help you remember each step, A, H, and A.

Resolving the Conflicts Lead to Greater Authenticity

The first step is A, authenticity and in this step you’re going to notice what you’re feeling and you’re just going to appreciate it and honor the humanity of your feelings, whatever they are, without trying to fix them or correct them. It’s an image that I use of holding our feelings with cupped hands, or the feelings of others with cupped hands. Cupped hands don’t squeeze and grab and try to change and push and force. And they’re also not just flat and unfeeling hands just holding something. Cupped hands cradle something. There’s a sense of giving it space, and if you want to do that you just could make this cup with your hands and imagine holding a feeling, a person’s heart and emotion with cupped hands. There’s a kind of cradling quality, there’s a treasure and quality, but it allows room to breathe as well. That’s an image for this first step in how we just recognize what we’re feeling and make room for it. So, you may just get a little bit of a feeling, you may not get any feeling yet, but if you do get a feeling just try to find some words that capture it. Some words that you could just put words on that feeling. It may take a while for the words to form, but just allow that time and maybe the feeling will express itself as a memory or maybe a piece of art, or music, or an image, or a smell, or a color. Whatever experience, whatever expression, captures your experience, just hold that.

The Awkward Stage of Resolving the Conflicts

And by doing that, you will have already created a degree of compassion for yourself and you’ll be able to find your way into the deeper meaning of whatever it is you’re experiencing. This stage might feel awkward or weird or uncomfortable and you might think, “I don’t want to do this now, it’s just too uncomfortable.” Or, “I don’t have time.” Or, “It’s too much work.” So you can expect a bit of inner resistance because it is work and it does take time and it is a little uncomfortable. And that inner resistance will kind of try to keep you from the challenge ahead but every time you get through that, you’ll come out on the other side and make more room for the humanity of your feelings, which is only a good thing. It’s actually a tiny act of personal greatness to take that brave step, and it’s, of course, a step toward richer self-understanding. Here’s a story. Here’s just an example story of somebody doing this process, doing step one, authenticity. Sharon, after years of hard work got her dream job and it was a high-level position in a very prestigious accounting firm. And now that she had reached her goal, she somehow found that she was kind of losing her ambition. She was coming in late even and sometimes making errors that she never should have made and she was furious at herself and just also completely bewildered. So she tried the AHA process and she began by allowing her feelings instead of judging them.

The Second Step in Resolving the Conflicts

In so doing she began to realize that she had been consistently unhappy in her job, but she never allowed herself to accept that reality because it just didn’t fit with all of her goals that she had been following for so many years. Her work environment, she realized, was kind of hostile and it was competitive and it was a complete change from her last job, and it was depressing. Until now, she hadn’t really let herself face how much she didn’t like this new job. The second stage is the step of honoring. This is the step that we’re most likely to overlook because few of us have been taught to do it. But it’s the antidote to our bewilderment and it is the path to our own unique wisdom. How do we do this? How do we become capable of honoring our authentic experience, especially when we’re feeling judgmental toward it or ashamed of what we’re feeling? The way to do it is to validate the worth of our feelings and the reality and the substance of our feelings, even if that feeling seems irrational or counterproductive, or self-sabotaging, or awkward. When we believe that we’re not supposed to feel a way that we do feel, our first reaction is usually a kind of reflexive act of self-correction that leaves our deep insides cringing against our own self-critique. What do you do if that’s happening to you? You’re trying to honor your authentic feelings, but you’re not liking them. You’re not proud of them, they don’t feel good, they don’t make sense, they seem self-sabotaging.

Resolving the Conflicts by Honoring Our Feelings

Well, I’m going to offer you three questions which will help you learn how to validate your emotional experience. So if you want, you could even pause the recording and think about a kind of inner conflict, something going on that you don’t like and don’t feel good about in your own life with someone else. Just pick one thing if you like, if you’d like to kind of walk through this with me and allow yourself first to just authentically feel the feeling. Now we’re going to practice honoring those feelings by answering these three questions. These questions will, as I said, help you validate the wisdom, the intelligence, and the need behind whatever it is that you’re feeling or whatever it is you’re acting. I think a good image is the image of a tree trying to grow around rocks. The way the tree grows, its got a goal and the goal is to reach for the sun, reach toward the sun, which is a beautiful goal. But if you look at the shape of the tree, it might be gnarled, it might be twisted because it’s had to do all of this work to reach for the sun when it’s been blocked. We see our behaviors and it’s easy to think, “Oh, that’s weird,” or, “That’s funny,” or, “I don’t like what I did.” Or, “I don’t like how I’m feeling or how I’m acting.”

Resolving the Conflicts Based From What We Were Taught

But when we realize that those feelings were us reaching toward something that mattered, and that’s how we had to shape ourselves to do it, it kind of helps us see the heart of the matter, which is what it is that matters, so that we can find a better way to get to it. These are the three questions and I’d like you to try asking these of yourself and see if any of them hit. One, it makes sense that I feel this way because – try that one on, you can pause this. Here’s another one, “These feelings are connected to my deeper self in this way….” You can pause it again and think about this and each of these is going to give you so much of a richer level of self-understanding. Next, “This conflict touches a really important value of mine because….”, and you can pause again, fill in the blank. And you can see when you do that, that you begin to understand that what you were doing or feeling makes way more sense than you might have realized, that’s the stage of honoring. But always we’re taught, “No, think about the other person’s need first. Forgive the other person first. Try to think better or more maturely or more realistically, or in a broader way.” But that doesn’t really work because we cannot amputate our feelings. We can honor them and we can grow them and we can educate them, but amputating or suppressing them just doesn’t work. These techniques will help you discover the wisdom in what it was that you were feeling or doing.

An Act of Quiet Violence

It’s challenging, but really the act of honoring is the most comforting path of all. It lets us express our deepest core gifts and it allows us to kind of relinquish the whip that we hold against ourselves.

Honoring asks kindness of us, and this is a deep thing.

Anything other than honoring is an act of quiet violence against our being. None of us can dishonor our inner self or feelings without repercussions. Now, if the conflict you’re experiencing is with someone else, you can follow this step in your own mind for the other person and honor what it is that they’re going through. First imagine what they might be going through, what it seems like they’re going through, and do the same process to honor, even though they’re behaving irrationally. There is a part of their soul locked in here. There’s a way that they’re reaching for the sun and maybe not in the best way, so you’re going to do this same honoring process for them. It’s not going to make you accept behavior that’s unacceptable. It’s not going to have you not feel what you feel, but it’s going to honor them, which is always a good thing as long as you’re honoring yourself as well. And you may only be able to guess what the person’s feeling or what their motivation is, but the practice of honoring it really often just creates breakthroughs in our understanding. If you try it, you’ll see that that happens. You could even pause right now and try it or just remember for a future time. So, back to Sharon.

The Key Point When It Comes to Resolving the Conflicts

Sharon had this realization, but she was troubled by it because she had worked so hard to achieve her professional goals and now she was questioning whether she was actually cut out for the job that she had thought she wanted so much. But by asking herself those questions that we just went through, she realized something really important which she had never admitted to herself. And this is a really key point and in my intensives and in my work with clients, again and again, similar moments to the one I’m going to describe happen for people and they’re life-changing. She had never really admitted to herself, this, that she was profoundly, profoundly sensitive to her social environments and she was happier and way more productive when she was in a positive environment, I guess as all of us are. But in a negative social environment it really got to her and she became really prone to depression and self-sabotage. She had always seen it as a weakness and she tried to fight against her sensitivity and be someone else and get through it and push through it, but it never worked. Now, she was understanding it in an honoring way that this was a deep and profound sensitivity. It was her DNA, it was who she is. She was not happy in critical, hostile environments and she’s not someone who could let it roll off her back and that is a gift, she realized. She was really challenged by that insight, but she was relieved because she was understanding. It was like she had her user’s manual.

The Scariest Step in Resolving the Conflicts

She knew why things weren’t working before and why they were working before. Step three, action. In this stage, what you do is you hold your inner self or you hold the other person with honor and then you act in whatever way feels wise and true and helpful once you’ve done the first two steps. And that action step can be really hard, and there’s that great quote from Maggie Kuhn, who is the founder of the Gray Panthers,

“Speak your mind even if your voice shakes.”

This might be the scariest step of all, but if you’ve already done the other steps, you’ll have created an inner push towards supporting yourself. When we take authentic action, our ability to find love and follow love and grow love is increased and our authentic self becomes more fully formed. We feel vulnerable, but we feel essentially worthy. And without that capacity to honor ourselves and take action on our feelings, our unconscious mind will protect us from love because it knows that we would either harm others with our anger, or harm ourselves by succumbing to other people’s needs and demands. When we know how to honor ourselves, our unconscious will open up and reveal our deepest gifts because it’s trusting us. So every time you practice this process, the part of you that can love and love yourself is strengthened and the more you do the process, the richer your life and your interactions with the world will become. Back to Sharon. She was kind of stunned by this realization and she decided she was going to try to see if she could improve her experience on the job, but also start exploring other job possibilities.

Fighting Against Innate Sensitivity

Instead of fighting against her innate sensitivity now she wanted to honor it. She realized that her sensitivity to social environments actually applied to all her relationships. And that she sabotaged herself every time she tried to suppress or dishonor her sensitivity. She began to see her need for positive environments and positive connection as a gift, as a core gift, and her pain when environments or connections weren’t safe also as a core gift instead of a weakness, which was a very new way to look at her life and her future. One of the most powerful ways that we can create closeness in any relationship is by practicing this technique. And really one of the greatest aphrodisiacs is the feeling that you and your partner celebrate each other’s gifts and hold each other’s wounds with compassion. Practicing these steps with a loved one is going to deepen the bond between the two of you, as well as your own capacity to live in the world and to love in this world. So try this technique and I think that you’ll find your compassion to yourself and other people increases in surprising and wonderful ways. Thank you so much for listening. If you like what you heard, I want to encourage you to go to deeperdatingpodcast.com and join my mailing list for a host of free resources and information about so many different programs that I run or that people I respect run. Thank you so much for that, and I look forward to seeing you in the next episode of the Deeper Dating Podcast.

There are two things that you need to find in a partner. If you put these two traits front and center, you’ll give yourself the very best shot at a future of happiness. These are also the two traits each of us needs to develop if we want the privilege of a love-filled life. Looking for these traits, and developing them in ourselves, are the greatest dating skills of all. Welcome to your best and truest dating adventure!

Table of Contents

• Two Things You Need to Keep Someone Interested in You
• Understanding the Difference Between the Two Things You Need
• The Second of the Two Things You Need
• Intimacy Lesson from Finding the Two Things You Need

Episode Introduction: Two Things You Need

What are the two things you need to look for in finding the person who’s right for you and becoming the person who can be right for someone else? Stay tuned to this episode of the Deeper Dating Podcast to find out. Hello, everybody, and welcome to The Deeper Dating Podcast. I’m Ken Page, and I’m a psychotherapist and the host of this show and the author of the bestselling book Deeper Dating: How to Drop the Games of Seduction and Discover the Power of Intimacy. And today I’m going to be talking about the two important things that you need to look for to find the partner who’s right for you. This week and every week, I’m going to share the greatest tools and insights that I know to help you find love and keep it flourishing in your life and heal your life in the process because the skills of dating are nothing more than the skills of love. And if you want to learn more about the Deeper Dating path to real intimacy, just go to deeperdatingpodcast.com. You can sign up for my mailing list and get a number of free gifts and learn more about how to use these ideas to transform your own intimacy journey. You’ll also find a transcript of this entire episode and of every episode. And I’m so excited to share that there is now a Deeper Dating downloadable course where I get to work intimately through 11 classes with you, taking you through each step of this journey and kind of distilling down the most important insights that I’ve learned in these years of doing this work, then guiding you through those in audio classes, one video class, and two workbooks.

Subscribe and Leave Ken a Review

So if you’re interested in tackling this work in a deeper, richer way, this is a fabulous way to do it. I encourage you to go to deeperdatingpodcast.com, and you can look under Deeper Dating course and find out more about it. Also, I want to say that everything I share in this podcast is educational in nature. It’s not medical or psychiatric advice or treatment. And if you’re experiencing any serious psychological conditions or symptoms, please seek professional help. And finally, please do feel free to subscribe and leave a review. That is always a wonderful, wonderful gift. Okay, so let’s jump in. So as a psychotherapist and a coach who has specialized in the search for love and as someone who was chronically single for decades and constantly is a student of intimacy, as well as a teacher, I really have come to believe that mindful dating leads us more quickly to real love and to richer, more fulfilling lives. What I’ve also come to find and believe is that the way we date often, or usually, determines the kind of love that we find, and the quality of love we find determines the very quality of our lives. So for most people, the search for a wonderful relationship is truly one of the most important missions of our adult lives. But the majority of dating advice, as I’ve said before, treats it like some kind of slick package of superficial actions or behavior tweaks that promise to result in getting our dream person to fall in love with us.

Two Things You Need to Keep Someone Interested in You

Learn this trick to keep women more interested in you. Here’s what you’re doing wrong and why men are avoiding you. Here’s what you need to do to become irresistible. This is just anguish to hear because the journey to find love is one that is so much more a wisdom journey than a quick fix. It’s just not about tricks and gimmicks. These skills are the deepest skills of intimacy, and they’re the very skills that every one you learn will help you keep your relationship alive and thriving when you do find it. This is a life journey. It’s not a quick fix. But, there are absolutely certain steps which we talk about here, and which many really serious and wonderful teachers talk about, that do transform our search for love. So that means that dating success is not about luck. It’s not. It’s really it’s not about having this smoking hot body. It’s not about being willing to suffer through countless bad dates. It’s about some really key wisdom lessons, and our search for love demands our deepest respect. So here’s a question. Is your approach to dating helping you deepen your capacity to give and receive love? If it’s not, you can find a new way to do this that will. And when you do, you will move that much more quickly to the love that you’re really seeking. I’m going to share two concepts that I think are pillars for the wiser search for love. Each of these two things asks something very powerful and very challenging of us and help us discriminate what kind of attractions, what kind of people can truly be the people with whom we could build a happy, rich future.

Embracing the Two Approaches

Embracing these two pieces of information, these two approaches will make our lives happier and more meaningful and richer in intimacy. And for each of these parts, there’s a dual journey, working on yourself to grow in this way and looking for this in the person you’re looking for. So the first one is, “does my soul feel safe with this person?” That, and I’ve spoken about this before, is the key question that when we ask it we shift our entire journey to love. It saddens me immensely to think of how many people, myself included for decades, and decades, and decades, don’t make that the central question. And for each one of you, I’m very excited to think about what’s going to shift for you when you make that the central question. Now, obviously, you have to be sexually attracted to this person. The person has to be of the gender or genders you’re interested in. There are so many specifics, and those are all good, and all real, and all become clear in their own time. But when this becomes your central question, you really, really are on the quickest path to happiness and finding love. And I truly, truly believe that. It’s not just am I attracted to this person, it’s does my soul feel safe with that person.

Attraction will take care of itself. If you’re not attracted to the person, it’s not going to be a match. But when you make this first your first question, you will be dignifying yourself and people will notice your spine a little bit straighter, your heart a little bit clearer, a sense of like “don’t screw with this person” because you will be dignifying who you really are.

The First Stage

So the first thing is that question, and so there’s different parts to that. I think that in the first stage when we look for people, when we’re looking for someone, we just look for the person we’re most attracted to because that’s what we’ve been taught. That’s the simplest, and that’s what makes the most sense. However, the people that we’re the most wildly and quickly attracted to for many of us are the people who embody the worst characteristics of our primary caregivers. And our psyche wants to go back to the scene of the crime and get this person for all the different reasons that we do this, who doesn’t really love us or love us right to finally love us and love us right. It’s the path to hell. And often, it’s the people we’re most intrigued and excited by that have those attributes. So in that first stage, we often choose people who ultimately are unkind, or unavailable, or self-involved, or maybe angry, or demeaning, not actively addicted, not good choices, but we don’t know better. It feels like home in some ways perhaps, so that’s what we choose. And so many of us do this at first because we haven’t been taught better or we don’t want to listen because we’re so crazy for this person and we’re so young or so kind of unaware of the deeper truths around this. So that’s kind of the first stage, is these choices that are really not good choices. And so many of us do this and so many of us spend a long time here.

Understanding the Difference Between the Two Things You Need

Then, when we grow, when we start asking ourselves, “Does my soul feel safe with this person? Do I feel inspired by who this person is? Is this person an attraction of inspiration as opposed to an attraction of deprivation?” Something I also talk about. And if you go to the show notes, you’ll be able to see the links to the episodes where I describe how you can understand the difference between those two circuitries of attraction. So when we learn these lessons, often, the next people we end up in relationship with are not it yet, but they’re stepping stones. This is something I’ve seen so many times. We pass out of phase one with people who really aren’t safe, and we move into step two. And step two is there are people where there can be moments of much deeper intimacy and connection. They have more qualities that inspire us, and they’re not cruel or unavailable, but maybe they’re not really completely available. And maybe some of the moments of connection are incandescent, but then they disappear or somehow they’re just not really there. And we know we’re doing better. We know we’re making better choices, so we’re excited and we don’t want to let go of this person because they’re closer to what we want, but they’re not really available, or they don’t really treat us right, or they’re not really safe. But they’re closer. That’s stage two. And I’ve seen again and again in the journey of people’s growths that there is a stage two, that we don’t just go from stage one to stage three, which is a healthy, really good relationship. There’s this stage two process that involves a lot of learning.

Acknowledging the Ways We Say No to Love

Now, just to back up for a minute, in that stage one section, we need to look as well at ways that we are unavailable. It does not mean that we are failures in love. I know for me that some of the most precious and important work that I have done, the most central work to be able to have the love that I have in my life is to acknowledge the ways that I say no to love, the ways in which loves scare me, shut me down, the ways in which I get numb, the ways in which I get insensitive, push people away. These are some of my greatest life lessons, and I’m incredibly thankful to those. So that’s a piece of the journey, too, in step one. Where are we unavailable for love? A number of episodes ago, I spoke about our walls to love and how we can change, and understand, and transform them. So that’s really good work for anybody who is admitting and acknowledging ways that they push love away and not knowing what to do about that. And the same applies to step two, that we may be, as we grow, emotionally and spiritually, more able to show those parts of ourselves, but then we flee. Then we push the other person away. Then we disappear. I’ve seen so much of that, and I’ve been so much of that in my life and in my journey to find love. So in this stage, we want to get to the point where we are with someone who is available to do that work, who doesn’t flee, who does not hide behind addictions, compulsion, and patterns that ultimately make them not available for the real work.

The Stage of Having Someone Who Stays

Someone doesn’t have to be not afraid of intimacy because that would be absolutely nobody. We’re all afraid of intimacy. But it’s someone who has learned the lessons where they could stay present and not flee and be able to commit even in the presence of all of their fears. That’s the kind of person we’re looking for. And the third stage is with someone who in all of their humanity, treasures us, loves us, and is safe, and we treasure them, and love them, and are safe too. Perfectly safe? Absolutely not, because intimacy is a process of rupture and repair. But essentially safe, essentially wanting to do the work, essentially available. And that’s stage three. So I want to ask all of you to consider these points and thinking about where you are, stage one, stage two, stage three, in the people that you’re dating and in the person who you are and what you show in your own dating life. And to take this question, “does my soul feel safe with this person”, and let that become your question. I literally don’t really have words for the leverage and the power of what that will give you when you make that your first question and your central question. And I really am hungry to hear your stories as you do that because it will change you, it will ground you, it will shift your sense of balance in the world, and it will speed your path to finding love and recognizing healthy love when it does come your way.

The Second of the Two Things You Need

Second – the second dynamic is to develop kindness and understanding and only pursue people who do the same. So when it comes to dating, we have been taught that cool trumps kind. And it’s really misguided and it is supported by a plethora of dating apps, and dating approaches, and dating events, and articles, and pieces of advice that take us away from our humanity. It is the fast track to emotional pain. I really often say that “next” has become the modern dating call. And when we do that, when that becomes our dating call, when that’s what we’re doing next, next, next, swipe, swipe, swipe, we’re looking for immediate physical attraction and we relentlessly judge other people and ourselves according to this checklist which might have validity but is not in the same axis as what’s the connection like. Who’s this human being? What is their sexiness? What is their warmth? So why has not anybody told us this thing that the research backs up? That kindness and understanding are two of the greatest aphrodisiacs that exist? So in your next dating experience, try practicing a little more kindness, and understanding, and generosity.

Go against the tide and see if it changes your inner state and the quality of your date, because chances are that it will. And the more you make that conscious choice, the more discriminating you’ll become about people who value those same qualities and do the hard work of living them. Really, when you make that choice, you’ll be like, “This cost me, man. “

Wiser Self Protection

“This took work. I want somebody who’s going to be able to do that work, too.” When you do that, you discover that wiser self-protection is less about keeping your distance and it’s more about becoming fiercely discriminating about the things that matter the most. Some things you might want to consider when you’re dating someone. How does this person treat clerks, and restaurant servers, and people who are for whatever reason vulnerable or don’t have anything particular to give to that person? Think back on that. How does this person treat the people that matter most to you? I remember being smitten by somebody who I was dating, and he wasn’t that kind to my friends. And my friends were very patient until they started getting really annoyed. But I noticed that, and he was not kind to me as well. It took me a while to realize that, but I saw it and felt it with how he treated my friends. So how much does this person consider the needs of other people? Here’s a huge one. Does this person listen to your feelings with care and interest? Are they able to listen? I’ve heard about this new term in dating called Kanyeing, which is only talking about yourself. I think that’s pretty funny, but so many people do that. And does this person have an innate generosity of spirit? Which I really want to point out is not the same thing as being romantically demonstrative. Somebody could be romantically, all flowers, and chocolate, and generous, and compliments, and all of that, but that’s different than their character being essentially generous, and that is what you’re looking for.

Students of Intimacy

Instead of just letting yourself be seduced by that kind of swept off your feet kind of generosity, which is something different in many cases. And usually, you will know in a relatively short amount of time if your date is someone who truly cares about these values. And if so, you have something to celebrate. And if not, I recommend that you protect yourself and move on. I say all the time that young, or old, or gay, or straight, or single, or coupled, we’re all students of intimacy. And just about every point in our lives, there are these deep and essential challenges that we have to tackle in order to find love, keep love alive, and become the people that we need to become. Maybe at this point you’re feeling the need to increase your compassion. Maybe you’re feeling the need to increase your self-compassion and self-care. Maybe you need to kind of steel your resolve to find love and take action. Maybe it’s about being truthful. Maybe it’s about being vulnerable. Or maybe it’s about protecting and saving a relationship that’s really important, that’s kind of losing ground. Take a minute now and think. You can pause the recording as well. What is up for you?

Intimacy Lesson from Finding the Two Things You Need

What’s your intimacy lesson now? What’s your prickly, thorny thing that is really your great gift? Because as you connect to that challenge and as you commit to work with it, you will grow, you will change, and that will make you someone who can bear, and handle, and enjoy the power of love in your life. So thank you so much for listening to this episode. I want to encourage you to go to deeperdatingpodcast.com and join my mailing list so you can get all of the information, all of the classes, all of the free things, and all of the courses that I teach, and kind of get to know this work more. That’s deeperdatingpodcast.com. So thank you all for listening, and I’ll see you next week on The Deeper Dating Podcast.

In this episode, you’ll learn how to discover your greatest intimacy gifts. These “Core Gifts” are the key to finding, attracting, and growing deep and true love. As you learn to name and honor your unique Core Gifts, your dating life will shift in profound and unexpectedly wonderful ways. By the end of this episode, you’ll have a new sense of your own greatest intimacy gifts.

Table of Contents

• The Place Where Our Intimacy Gifts Resides
• The Heat of Our Intimacy Gifts
• The Compelling Pull of Our Intimacy Gifts
• Naming Our Intimacy Gifts

Episode Introduction: Intimacy Gifts

What is the single greatest key for being able to bear the heat of intimacy, to be able to find love and keep it flourishing and discover the love in your own heart? Stay tuned to this episode of the Deeper Dating Podcast to find out. Hello everybody and welcome to the Deeper Dating Podcast. I’m Ken Page and I’m a psychotherapist. I’m the author of the bestselling book Deeper Dating and the host of this podcast. And today we’re going to talk about what I kind of think is the most important piece of all in anybody’s search for inner and outer love, your core gifts. Every week in this podcast I’m going to share with you the greatest tools that I know to help you find love and keep it flourishing and heal your life in the process because the skills of dating are nothing more than the skills of love, and the skills of love are the greatest skills of all for a happy and rich and meaningful life. And if you want to learn more about the deeper dating path to real intimacy, just go to deeperdatingpodcast.com, and if you sign up for my mailing list, you’ll get free gifts there and you’ll learn more about how to use these ideas to transform your intimacy journey. And you’ll also find a complete transcript of this entire episode. And I’m so excited to say that for anyone who wants to take this work to the next level, I’ve just come out with a downloadable online course, put in many, many, many, many hours kind of encapsulating the essence of what I think is the most important core of this work.

Subscribe and Leave Ken a Review

And so in this online course I will guide you through a series of 11 classes, one video and the rest audio step-by-step along with the workbook, taking you through all of the journey that I’ve come to understand as the most powerful, effective, and healing journey to find love and keep it flourishing. So you can just go to deeperdatingpodcast.com and look at Deeper Dating Course to learn more about that. And I hope that many of you join and take that course. Also, I just want to say that everything I share in this podcast is educational. It’s not medical or psychological advice or treatment for any condition. And if you’re experiencing any serious psychological conditions, please seek professional help. And finally, people have left me the most beautiful reviews and it’s an incredible gift to me and to the community if you’re touched or moved or believe in the work that I’m doing to just leave a review and to subscribe. So thanks so much for that. And let’s jump in. This is the heart and soul of I’d say the biggest lesson that I have learned in my decades and decades as a psychotherapist and as a person for whom love and the search for love has been incredibly important. Here’s what it is.

The Place Where Our Intimacy Gifts Resides

The places we’re the most scared to reveal, the places we’ve been hurt the most, the places where we have the most insecurity, the places where our power or our tenderness frightens us the most are our core gifts. And they are the absolute greatest key to being able to find love, feel love, and have a home in this world and live our mission. The very things we’re scaredest of, scaredest, is that a word? That we’re the most tender about, the most uncertain about, the places where the world has understood us the least, are our genius and the degree to which we embrace those parts of ourselves and name them and come to learn and understand their fire, their tenderness, their magic, their treasure, and their importance. To that degree, we are going to be attracted to people who love us for who we are, and we’re going to be able to build a life that is full and rich with love. Now is that journey easy? Of course not. Is every day a new set of challenges? Absolutely. But it’s a simple and profound formula that the more we love and honor and dignify those parts of ourselves, the more successful we will be in love, and the more successful we will be as human beings living in this world. And the more successful we will be at being us. So what are these core gifts, and how can we find and discover what they are and learn to back them and dignify them, and use them, and treasure them? Well, that’s going to be a subject that I cover in a number of different episodes.

Our Intimacy Gifts Being the Center of the Center

And I realized today that I have done 61 episodes so far and only now am I touching this in a very direct way. And it’s because it’s such a kind of tender and important and profound piece but also such a vast piece that I kind of kept waiting. Although I alluded to it and spoke about it in many different ways. This is an episode that is devoted to this center of the center of all of this work, which is our core gifts. So here’s an image to get us started with this process. And it’s an image that I have used in other episodes. It’s a fabulous and ultra-simple image. It’s the image of a target. And so if you imagine a target and you imagine this target has concentric rings, and that target is the topography of your psyche, your being, and your life. It’s the topography of your inner world. And the closer you get to the center of that target, the closer you’re getting to the deepest, most tender, most powerful parts of your humanity. The places where you have felt life the most deeply, the places where you get the most touched and affected by life in joy, in pain, in longing, in creativity, and in intimacy. But that’s a very powerful place the center of that target. It’s where our deepest hurts are, it’s where our fiercest power lies. It’s where our uniqueness comes into its own fullness in the language of our being and our mission comes into its own fullness.

Defensive Ways of Living

And we know that that can be a scary thing to live in the world because it sets us apart in some ways, and we fear that we won’t be loved when we show those parts of ourselves. And maybe we haven’t been loved, and often we are the most hurt around our greatest gifts. We’ll be talking about that more. That’s as you move in closer to the center and then so because the heat is so great in that way of living the heat is so great, as we get closer to the beating heart of our humanity, to the core of our authenticity, we protect ourselves. We create airbrushed versions of ourselves that are kind of more built so that we don’t get hurt and we get approved of. Those are kind of defensive ways of living, and they protect us from the fierceness of what’s inside. I’ve often quoted William Blake who says that we’re here for just a bit of time on this earth to learn to bear the beams of love. So because the beams of love are so fierce, we create airbrushed versions of ourselves. And if you’ll imagine the further out you get in this target is the more protected and defended you become. And when you reach a certain point, the world becomes a lot colder and a lot emptier and more and more addictions and compulsions can take hold. Things like workaholism and a whole range of addictions, all the ways that we kind of avoid the heat of our being.

The Heat of Our Intimacy Gifts

So the further out you get, the safer you get in a way, because you’re further away from the heat of your core. But the further out you go, the less safe you are because the emptier you become, the less true you become. The more you build a life based on a projected self that’s not really who you are. So this is the map. This is the map right here that we’re going to be working with. Once you get, no one really lives in the center of the center of the center except very enlightened beings because you can’t just jump there and get there. It’s a journey. To be able to bear that part of you and live it well in the world takes a set of skills of such profound maturity and integration that we have to grow into overtime. But there’s a certain closeness that we hit that I call our gift zone. It’s when we may not be right in this center, but we feel the heat and the warmth of our humanity and we hold it with a sense of compassion and space. And any time we feel our humanity in sadness, in joy, in peace, in quietness, in connection, in bewilderment, in creativity, whatever it is that we’re feeling in our humanity and the more we can hold that with a sense of compassion, what I call cupped hands, we are in our gift zone. We are somehow illumined when we’re in that space. We are very beautiful. We are in our magic. And in this zone, we are going to be so much more attractive to the people who are looking truly, deeply for someone like us.

Living With Our Intimacy Gifts

We will also be feeling the flow of our own unique love because we’re in the place where we can love the world and love ourselves. So this is a sacred, sacred space. And quite simply, the more we live in our gift zone, the richer our life will be in all aspects, in all arenas, including creativity and love. In this space lie our core gifts and our core gifts, they’re kind of the way that we are built. They’re the way that we’re organized. They’re the center of the things that matter most to us. And core gifts are like fingerprints in a way. Everyone has fingerprints and there are certain basic things that are kind of universal in our core gifts. Our need for love, our need for connectedness, our need for freedom, our need for independence, our need to give, our need to receive. All these things are very, very basic and universal, but like fingerprints for each one of us those core gifts are also unique.

And for so many different reasons we go through life not being able to name or own them, and the biggest reason that’s true is because we haven’t been taught to have gift eyes, to see the importance of these gifts, and to discover them not only in our joys but in our insecurities and our pains because they can be found most quickly and easily in our deepest hurts and our greatest joys.

In a moment, I’m going to give you some ideas about how you can begin to discover and name your core gifts, but first I just want to read something from my book Deeper Dating about core gifts.

Intimacy Gifts Coming From the Core

“Your core gifts lie at the center of your search for intimacy because they’re the deepest and most sensitive parts of you. The parts that feel love and the effects of love most intensely. Core gifts come from our core. They feel essential to our identity. If we look at our lives, we find areas of particular sensitivity, vulnerability, and passion that are triggered by similar things.” Something that hurts your feelings might off someone else’s back. Something that makes you feel deeply inspired may have little impact on someone else. We experience the most joy and the most pain around these highly charged parts of our being. So you can take a minute and think about this right now. In relationships, what are the things that give you the greatest joy? The greatest sense of connection? They might not hit your partner in quite the same way, but they’re what really touch your heart. They speak the language. They’re your love language. They’re your intimacy language. What are the things that bother you the most in your relationships that other people might not feel them in the same way or with the same intensity? I want to say that if you have listened to this podcast this far, I imagine that you are someone who has a quality of deep sensitivity that may have gotten you in trouble or hurt you in your life. Because I don’t think that people would be listening to this episode if they didn’t have a passion for deeper intimacy and a kind of felt sense of the importance of those tender places in their heart.

The Compelling Pull of Our Intimacy Gifts

I think that this work tends to attract people who have a deep sensitivity that maybe they’ve been told they were over-sensitive or deep compassion or generosity or maybe a deep kind of intensity that the world has often told them is too much. So, I’ll continue – in your relationships, you might be most prone to being angry or distant when you feel wounded around your core gifts. When you feel inspiration, validation, and acceptance around them, you’ll shine. As you come to see the patterns of how you’re affected by the experiences in your relationships, your core gifts will become clearer to you. Core gifts aren’t a gimmick. They’re not a packageable commodity that works like a genie to meet our deepest desires.

They’re the ache, the compelling pull, the inner reaching that we sometimes honor and sometimes try to silence. They’re the music that keeps playing below the surface of our minds and to acknowledge your core gifts is unequivocally to create a deeper intimacy with your most essential self.

So in my book, in my intensive, in my work with clients, my coaching work with clients, and in this new online course, a huge amount of the journey is about discovering and naming your core gifts. It’s a process that is so beautiful and so important that I devote a huge amount, and so counter-intuitive that it’s really important to devote a lot of time to helping people be able to pick out these core gifts. So what are the questions that we can ask ourselves to discover our core gifts? And again, there’s going to be a lot more about this.

Getting to the Essence of Love

Well there’s so much more in the book and in the course, but there is going to be so much more than I talk about in this podcast as well to help you learn to discover and honor your core gifts, which is just a journey of its kind of getting to the essence of love, liberation, and self dignifying. So the questions are, and you can note this in your day to day life, what are the things that touch you the most in your heart? What are the things that give you the most sense of inspiration? And the next time you feel that instead of just thinking, “Oh, this is a nice moment,” or, “I feel good,” actually kind of reflect backwards and think, what does this say about what matters most to me? How might this be a core gift? What is it in this situation that is really touching my heart? These are questions that are the foundation of true, authentic self-love. Another question is, what are the things that hurt your heart? That’s not such an easy one, but it’s such an important one because you’ll have experiences in your day to day life that sometimes they even feel like, did you ever get a paper cut and you don’t even know you got hurt. You don’t even feel it, but maybe five minutes later you go, “Ow, that stung.” That kind of situation where you’re in a social setting and you think everything’s fine. You’re telling yourself it’s okay. You don’t feel as good, but you’re telling yourself it’s okay and then all of a sudden later you say, “Ouch. There was something that didn’t feel right in that. That didn’t feel good.”

Micro Ruptures Around Our Intimacy Gifts

Those moments are gold because as they say, intimacy is a journey of rupture and repair. And we feel these micro ruptures most deeply in the places of our core gifts. So the things that bother you that maybe don’t bother anyone else are treasures because they tell you about what matters most to you. If you look at the things that hurt your heart the most, and if you look at the things that move and fill your heart the most, and you kind of put them together, it’s like a connect the dots puzzle, a picture emerges. And that picture is of your core gifts, the things that touch you and matter the most deeply. Here’s the deal, the degree to which we dishonor those, and this is a formula that has become so clear to me in the work that I do and I think really speaks to a much deeper physics of dating and intimacy. And I’ve seen it so many times that I just know it’s true, and I’m still in awe of a kind of magic that goes with it. To the degree that you honor and dignify and name those parts of yourself, you will be connected to the stream of love that is who you are and you will become sexually and romantically attracted to people who honor that part of you. The degree to which you don’t yet treasure those parts of yourself. This is an ongoing journey for all of us. There’s always more, there’s always more. But the degree to which you don’t treasure those extra sensitivities and honor them and see them as portals to your greatest self.

Naming Our Intimacy Gifts

The degree to which you can’t do that with those sensitivities or passions or intensities, you will be sexually and romantically attracted to people that chip away at your self worth, that end up with you feeling like there’s a thumb on top of you, that there’s something wrong, that there’s something wrong with you in your very existence, in your way of being. As you learn to name your core gifts and finally dignify them, and we can go through like a lifetime and not have done that. And I’ll talk about why that is in another episode. But the key is the degree to which you learn to honor those, your world will change. For example, in my intensives, which are six month long journeys for small groups of people who want to really take this in a very, very deep way, again and again when the core gift work is done in the course to the point that people have a visceral living sense of those parts of themselves, so much changes. Discrimination increases. People say, “Oh, I can’t accept what I was accepting before.” People start honoring who they are and asking for what they need. I’ve seen this again and again and I’ve seen it in my own life because my attributes of sensitivity and my fierce hunger for truth, and intimacy, and authenticity got me in trouble my whole life. And the act of discovering that those were my soul gifts was the process that changed my world and changed my life. And one that I still live every day but at a different level now.

The Beginning Of Understanding What Our Intimacy Gifts Are

So in my book and in my course, I teach step-by-step processes to help you be able to name and identify your core gifts. But the beginning of that is the understanding what hurts your heart and what quickens and fills your heart. That’s the place to start. The other question that you can ask that is a fabulous important part. As you begin to come to understand, and name, and identify, and articulate those gifts inside yourself. Here’s another fabulous question, in what relationships do these gifts feel deprived of oxygen? What does that feel like when these gifts are deprived of oxygen? Those are the old patterns. In what relationships do these gifts feel like they can breathe, like they can play, like they can grow, like there’s room for them to exist? Those are the treasure relationships. Those are the relationships that are X marks the spot for where we want to build our life in this world, for where we want to build our home in this world. So these are some rich, rich questions to think about, and I really encourage you to get back to me by going to deeperdatingpodcast.com and going to ‘Ask Ken’ and sharing your experiences with these experiments and with this new way of understanding what your core gifts are. When you go to deeperdatingpodcast.com, you can join my mailing list and learn more about all the work that I’m doing. So thank you so much for listening and I look forward to speaking with you on the next episode of the Deeper Dating Podcast.

Listeners bring their most important questions about love, sex, dating and relationships to Ken–and get his personal direct advice in Ken’s Q and A podcasts. Once a month, Ken answers your personal questions about love, dating, sex and more. Today’s powerful questions are all about sexual and romantic attraction.

Table of Contents

• Expert Advice on Emotional and Romantic Needs
• Expert Advice on Shifting the Fields
• Expert Advice on How to Shift From Attractions of Deprivation to Attractions of Inspiration
• Expert Advice on Dealing With Sparks

Episode Introduction: Expert Advice

In this episode, I’m going to answer your questions about love, attraction, and romance. For example, “I met someone really great, but I’m just not physically attracted to him. What do I do?” Or, “I met someone really great and he’s not been ready or wanting to have sex yet, and it’s been a few months. How do I handle that?” Stay tuned to the Deeper Dating Podcast to hear my advice on these and other questions about love, sex, and romance. Hello, everybody, and welcome to the Deeper Dating Podcast. I’m Ken Page, and I’m a psychotherapist, a coach, the author of the bestselling book Deeper Dating, and the host of this show. And in this podcast, I’m going to be bringing you the greatest tools I know to help you find love and keep it flourishing and heal your life in the process because the skills of dating are nothing more than the skills of love, and the skills of love are the greatest skills of all for a happy life. And today, I’m going to be answering your questions about love and sex. The questions today focus particularly on the subject of attraction, sexual and romantic attraction, so I’m excited to dig into that. And if you want to learn more about the Deeper Dating path to real intimacy, just go to deeperdatingpodcast.com. You’ll find a complete transcript of this episode, and you will also hear about my new downloadable course where I guide you through this journey step by step. And if you sign up for my mailing list, you’ll get free gifts and learn more about how to use these ideas to transform your own intimacy journey.

Subscribe and Leave Ken a Review

I also want to say that everything I’m going to share in this podcast is educational in nature. It’s not medical or psychiatric advice or treatment. And if you’re experiencing any kind of serious psychological or psychiatric conditions, please do seek professional help. Finally, if you like what you’re learning here, and I hope that you do, it would be a fabulous thank you if you subscribed and left me a review. The reviews that I get are so beautiful, and they really encourage other people as well to listen to the show. So thank you so much for that. Let’s dive in. So I’ve got four different questions, and I think they’re all really exciting and all hit on really important points. By the way, if you want to leave your question on here so that I can answer it on the podcast, just go to deeperdatingpodcast.com, click Ask Ken, and you’ll be able to actually record a message for me. So the first message is from Patty. Patty says, “I’ve been listening to your podcasts, and I have a situation. I’ve been dating my boyfriend for two months now. I’m 52, and it’s the first time I’ve ever dated anyone like him. He’s romantic. He’s respectful. He’s everything that I’ve been looking for.” And I just want to interrupt here, folks, and say that this is what I hear again and again, and you’ll be hearing that in these questions.

Because when you tackle your search for love from a place of really dignifying your vulnerabilities, and your humanity, and looking only for someone who does the same, your entire search for love begins to change.

Expert Advice on Emotional and Romantic Needs

So she goes on to say, “We have not yet had sex after two months. We’ve been dating consistently two times a week, and we see each other at a mutual event that we do pretty much every day. And my question is, should I be concerned that there might be a deeper reason that he doesn’t want it to move forward? He made a comment about wanting to develop an emotional relationship first.” So feedback on this, my thoughts about this situation. So two months and not having sex could be okay. But my question is, is the conversation romantic? Does this person talk about, and do you talk about, your romantic interest in each other? Also, is there physical affection? Is there some kissing? Is there hand holding? Is that developing, and is that growing? If the answer to those things are all yes, then that’s fabulous. That’s really good. Some people just take a longer time. However, here’s what I want to say about this also. In the interest of kind of dating in a newer and wiser way, that doesn’t mean that you don’t have needs, emotional needs and romantic needs. And you have a right to ask him these very questions. Is there something to be concerned about? Does he feel like this is growing? Also, I just want to say that there are ways to cultivate sexual connection that don’t involve direct sex, like holding hands, like talking about your romantic interest in each other, like exchanging eye gazing, like saying romantic things together, like talking about how you would like to be together at some point physically.

A Beach Ball Effect

If none of those things are getting any good response, then I would say there is something to be concerned about here. But the bottom line is this, that the heart and the soul of intimacy is “into-me-see”. If you are holding back on expressing your concerns and your worries, of course you want to do it in a positive way. You just want to ask him how he’s feeling, what he’s thinking. Does he see this as progressing? But if you’re holding back on expressing those things, then what you’re going to do is create this kind of beach ball effect.

A beach ball won’t stay under water forever if you push it down. And if we take our needs in a relationship and push them down in the interest of being unselfish, in the interest of being patient, we can only do that but so long and it’s going to end up biting us in the butt.

It’ll come out in a way that just isn’t helpful, either in resentment, or in self dislike, or in looking for other people. So I just want to give you space to realize that your needs are important here, too. He sounds like an amazing man, and he sounds like the kind of guy that you can have this conversation with. The next question is actually from another Patty. “Hi, Ken. My name’s Patty. I’m 42, and I have two kids, a nine-year-old girl and a two-year-old boy, and I’m raising them by myself. I also own a business. And it sounds like a lot, but it doesn’t feel like a lot.

Expert Advice on Finding a Date Who Sees Beyond Your Baggages

I’ve got it down, and they have a really great life and great friends, and I make time for myself to meet people, to go out with my friends, and I have interests. The more time I have, I try to go do things where I might meet people who have the same interest. I’ve been working on the things from your book and your podcast and leading with my books, and I have been meeting more quality people,” and folks, this does happen, and it’s such a joy, “and getting dates with men I actually would like to build relationships with.” “But the problem is that I’ve been having is that men don’t see our lifestyles meshing in the long run. I dated one person for three months who was pretty great, but he said that he’d be going from five kids to two kids on the days that he doesn’t have his kids, and he wanted a break from having kids basically. And I went on a few dates with a really nice guy who I thought we’d end up dating. But by the end of the third date he said I’m smart, and attractive, and one of the kindest people he’s ever met, but he doesn’t see it working in the long run because our lifestyles are so different with me having young kids. So I was just wondering, how do I go about dating and finding somebody who will take my life, my whole life, and with whom I can build a relationship with, with small kids?” So as someone who adopted a child as a single dad at 45 years old and then was dating with a child, I really do relate to this.

Expert Advice on Shifting the Fields

What I want to say to you, Patty, and I want to say this to every one of you who is trying to date in these more conscious ways and beginning to see shifts.

One of the shifts you will notice is that you will lose your taste for people that chip away at your sense of deep self-worth. And you’ll find yourself meeting somehow, almost amazingly, more people who honor you for who you are and where there’s a mutual deep sense of respect. It’s amazing how this works, and it’s true.

What I would say first, Patty, is celebrate that because your field is shifting. What I also want to say is it’s continuing to shift, and it will continue to shift. So you will continue to meet people until you meet someone who celebrates the fact that you have young children. I just want to say there are a lot of guys out there who would love to have kids, and your kids are pretty young. So that could be a really, really wonderful thing. For the right guy, this will not get in the way. For the right guy for whom you are the right woman, he might have to go through some changes and some processes, but he won’t want to let you go. So keep looking. I know that it’s a complicated thing. And sometimes, the person we end up meeting is not as tall as we wanted them to be, doesn’t have as much hair as we want them to have, isn’t as whatever as we want them to be. They have a different kind of job than we want. The universe does that to us.

Close But Not Quite

But if the essential stuff is still there, if there’s attraction and an inner sense of celebration, we have to go through some changes. So I do encourage you to, when someone is really clear that they do not want to be with someone who has kids or has kids of your age, honor that. Respect that. If they change their mind down the road, they can come back to you. But keep looking because they are there. And in your online profiles and when you meet people, you can talk about this pretty much upfront, and you should, so that people kind of can make their own choices and so that you don’t end up getting hurt in the long run. What you have is precious. You have two awesome kids. That’s a treasure. For the right person, that is going to be a wonderful thing. These guys that you’ve been meeting are closer to the mark, but they’re not at the mark. Don’t give up. So next, a man who didn’t leave his name brought up a really interesting question, one that I’d really like to address. He said, “My question relates to things you’ve said about the people we sometimes pass over. You said it in the context of online dating, but I’m sure it could apply more generally. You even used the classic number system, like people who are a 10, which is like the hottest of the hot, versus people who are, let’s say, a zero where there’s absolutely no sexual attraction, and the people in the middle.

Attracted to the Nines and Tens

You discussed those fives, sixes, and sevens that we sometimes tend to pass by too quickly,” and I’d include the fours and even the threes in that, “and not recognize the potential that’s there and instead only go for the eights, and the nines, and the tens that may be flashier or catch our attention.” Often, those people are so wildly attractive because, couples theory shows, particularly Harville Hendrix and his brilliant work, shows that we are often attracted to these nines and tens because unconsciously they embody some of the worst characteristics of our primary caregivers and we want to go back to the scene of the crime to let this kind of proxy for that person finally love us right, which is often a recipe for disaster. Not that you shouldn’t go for nines or tens, but just be aware of that. Also, look for the people with whom there is a spark, even if it’s not a crazy pyrotechnical spark at first. But his question is, and he says, “My question is I’m sure I don’t hear you saying that we should settle. And I’m not talking in terms of looks about nines, tens, and eights.” He says, “I’m talking about the total person, someone that I might rate at a nine, or an eight, or a 10 for all aspects of who they are. It seems like to some extent in a healthy way a person should want to go for someone like that. So I wonder if you could discuss that a little bit more.”

Expert Advice on How to Shift From Attractions of Deprivation to Attractions of Inspiration

I would say I do have a response to that. Mark Manson talks about people who are a “fuck yes”. That’s what he says. He says, “Why would you not go for someone who is a ‘fuck yes’?” And I absolutely 100% agree. You do want to go for someone who your heart’s bursting with excitement at who they are. But here’s the thing. Often, this kind of gripping, what I call attraction of deprivation, feels like an 8, or a 9, or a 10 at first and not for the right reasons. Often, these people excite us so wildly because we sense their unavailability, and so then we want them even more. Many of us who are used to that kind of experience push away the people who are the fives, the sixes, the sevens because they’re just not unavailable enough. But here’s the thing. If you’re dating someone who is what I call an attraction of inspiration and there is a physical and romantic spark, cultivate that. Keep dating the person. And you may find that that number grows and grows. Now, some people say, “That number does not grow for me. If I’m not attracted to somebody intensely, it is never going to grow.” And that’s possible. But for most of us, those feelings absolutely can grow, and that’s the process of courting. Research also shows that most people who are in good relationships did not necessarily fall instantly in love. It’s something that develops over time. So yes, you want someone with whom there’s that full-bodied sense of physical connection, sexual connection, spiritual connection, and emotional connection. And that person may not feel like an 8, or 9, or 10 at first.

Expert Advice on How to Cultivate Attractions of Inspiration

They might feel like a 4, or a 5, or a 6. But in my podcast, and in my book, and in my online course, I talk about ways that you can cultivate and deepen those kinds of attractions and that experience of having someone who you’re turned on to, the sex is wonderful, and their goodness is so fabulous, their generosity is so fabulous, the goodness and the solidity of the love between you feel so good and they’re so kind of generally present and available. When those things blend together, it feels like your heart is bursting. It’s bursting not with this longy, achy, I can’t have, I want, but it’s bursting with a sense of goodness, and joy, and celebration and desire. That’s what we want. The last question is from Sophia. Sophia, so good to hear from you. I know you’ve asked a few questions before. I always love your questions. So you said, “Hey, Ken. I have a question for you about attractions of inspiration. I think I’ve met my first one, which is really exciting, after a lifetime of dating attractions of deprivation and I’m really excited. He’s great. He’s so kind and loving, and it all just feels so easy, and nice, and openhearted, and healthy. But I’m worried because I just don’t feel that physically attracted to him at all. I don’t know if that’s something that’s normal because it’s an attraction of inspiration, so it’s not as hot as an attraction of deprivation, or if it’s something that’s really not going to work for me long term. He’s shorter than me, which is just something that I really like dating men taller than me.”

Expert Advice About the Shifting Journey

“I don’t know. I’m just not that physically attracted. And I’m curious if you have any advice for me. Thank you so much.” Sophia, thank you so much for that. Such an important question. So the first thing I want to say is you do not have to date anyone because it seems like they’re a good person if you’re not sexually and romantically attracted. That’s like a kind of self-torture. That’s the first broad thing that I want to say. But I hear you say I don’t feel very physically attracted to him. So I guess the question there is, are you somewhat physically attracted to him? And if so, I’m going to talk about some techniques that can strengthen that attraction. If you’re not attracted at all and you have not been, what I would say to you, Sophia, celebrate, celebrate, celebrate that you are now shifting, but it’s a journey. We do not go from unhealthy patterns to really fabulous patterns right away. It’s a process. It’s like a giant ship that has to change direction in the ocean. It happens, but it really takes time. These are all signs of your field shifting. So I’m going to say the same thing to you, which is keep trying and keep looking if this person isn’t a match because you are shifting. It’s fabulous. It’s happening. The circuitry is beginning to shift, and it’s going to continue to shift. So three cheers for you for doing this deeper, richer work and experiencing that. So now, if there has been a spark, once again, if there hasn’t been a spark, you are not obligated. You are not obligated. Be friends with this person.

Expert Advice on Dealing With Sparks

And conceivably, when the pressure comes off because you’re just friends, you might sexually start fantasizing about him, maybe not. But you do not have to because that kind of pressure just kills Eros. It really does. And I want to say this again to everybody who is interested in this deeper path. Just because someone is good, and decent, and kind, and available, and interested, if there just isn’t a spark, that’s really okay. You deserve to be with someone with whom there is a spark. So what about when there is some spark, but not really enough? Just a few suggestions. One, whatever that spark wants you to do, let yourself consider doing that, unless it’s kind of at a further level of sex than you have reached with this person. I’ll just give some examples. Let’s say all you want to do with this person, like “I like him. He’s cute. I’m not attracted to him in a really sexual way. But yet, I could see holding hands. I could see kissing. I could see cuddling. In fact, I would like those things,” then that’s what you do. And demand nothing more of yourself. You can let him know this is kind of all I want to do now. Let him. He’s an adult. He can deal with that. As long as you’re being honest and you don’t have to say, “I’m not sure if I’m interested in you.” You could just say, “I move slowly. I let things develop. And is that okay with you?” So let yourself do those things that feel good in those ways, even if they’re little things, and even if they’re sensual and not directly sexual.

Expert Advice on Indulging in Wild, Sexy Fantasies

Or maybe you don’t feel like you really want to commit to being sexual with this person, but you do have a couple of wild, sexy fantasies that you could imagine doing with them, which might be so far beyond where you would be really actually willing to go with him. But in your fantasy life, you might let yourself dream about that, and imagine that, and pleasure yourself, and think about that, and let those kind of tendrils of sexual interest develop in your fantasy life. So that’s something that you can do as well to develop connection. You do things with this person that are fun. If you’re pressuring yourself that you need to feel more, that’s going to hurt you, so back off. Give yourself space. Do things that are fun, even if you need to say to this person something like, “At this point, I’d like to be friends. It could be more in the future, but could we just be friends now?” So you allow yourself some space, but you take the pressure off yourself. These all different options that you could do. Let your Eros, let your romance, let those parts of you tell you what they want and what they don’t want. And listen and honor that whatever it is. These techniques will help you even if this guy is not the right guy. But once again, celebrate because your circuitry is shifting. So the last thing I want to say, and I want to say this to everyone who is listening, is that this is a journey of changing our deepest circuitry.

Expert Advice on How to Develop a Deeper Sense of Self-Love

As you learn the steps that I talk about in the online course, my book, these podcasts, you will actually begin to heal your life, your heart. You will develop a deeper sense of self-love, and you will be meeting people who are more appropriate for you, who are people who can treasure who you are. And you’ll be experiencing the challenges, the dilemmas, the struggles, and the beauties that happen when you meet somebody who can really be available for who you are, and it’s a kind of stepping stone journey. If you are seeing shifts in the ways that you approach your search for love, celebrate. And if you’re seeing shifts in the kind of people you’re magnetizing, triple and quadruple, celebrate, because that’s hard-won dating wisdom, and it’s real, and it’s going to shift your future. That’s why I truly do feel like this is a path of hope, of deep hope, and of healing. And the wiser path to love should be healing your life, healing your heart, and changing your circuitry around intimacy. If it’s not, it might be time for a deeper dive. Thank you all for listening. Write in. Call in. Go to Ask Ken because I want to hear your stories and your dilemmas so that I can share them with this community. So thank you all. And again, please do remember to leave a review if you like what you heard. And I’ll see you on the next episode of the Deeper Dating Podcast. Thank you.

What’s the great secret to release your barriers to love? It’s understanding specifically how they are protecting you! Armed with that knowledge, you’ll be able to “whisper” them down, sometimes more quickly than you ever might have imagined. In this episode, I’ll teach you some simple, life-changing techniques to help you learn the secret language of your own barriers to love, and to release them–starting right now.

Table of Contents

• The Different Stages of Our Barriers to Love
• Holding Our Barriers to Love With Cupped Hands
• Teaching Our Psyche How to Handle Our Barriers to Love
• The Decalcification of Our Barriers to Love

Episode Introduction: Barriers to Love

What do you do when you have a wall up in relation to love? Something that every single one of us experiences. In this episode, you’re going to learn the keys to be able to understand your personal walls against love and begin to transform them. So stay tuned to the Deeper Dating Podcast to learn more. Hello, and welcome to The Deeper Dating Podcast. I’m Ken Page, and I’m a psychotherapist and the author of the bestselling book Deeper Dating. And today, in this episode, I’m going to talk about the second two stages in healing our walls against love, and I’ll catch you up as well on the first two stages of that process. Every week I’m going to share with you the greatest tools I know to help you find love and keep it flourishing and heal your life in the process. Because the skills of dating are nothing more than the skills of love, and the skills of love are the greatest skills of all for a happy, meaningful life. And if you want to learn more about the Deeper Dating path to real intimacy, just go to deeperdatingpodcast.com. And if you sign up for my mailing list, you’ll get free gifts and you’ll learn more about how to use these ideas to transform your own intimacy journey. You’ll also find a complete transcript of every episode.

Subscribe and Leave Ken a Review

I also just want to say that everything I share in this podcast is educational in nature. It’s not medical or psychiatric advice or treatment for any condition. And if you’re experiencing any serious psychological or psychiatric conditions, please do seek professional help. And by the way, if you like what you’re learning here, it would be a tremendous thank you if you subscribed on Apple Podcast or elsewhere and left me a review. So thank you so much for that. So let’s jump in because this subject of our walls to love is one of the richest and most powerful ways for us to deepen our entire lives, find love, keep love alive, and have more and more of a sense of true meaning and deepest growth in our existence.

Our walls are the meat and potatoes of our journey. Our walls and understanding those walls, and seeing how those walls are made up of us, and how we’ve had to build them to protect ourselves, and to learn the language of our walls, and to be able to change those patterns, bringing more compassion to ourself and to other people, well, that’s the real deal.

It’s the real deal, and it’s what all of us should be striving toward in our lives.

The Different Stages of Our Barriers to Love

And when we do it, our worlds open up. And the feeling of our world’s opening up, even if it’s just a sense of a kind of heart-melting feeling of knowing that you didn’t treat somebody well enough and that you’re going to talk to them and let them know that you feel badly about that or that you understand something about someone that you hadn’t understood before or you make space for a part of yourself that you never were able to make space for before. And it’s when we can’t make space for parts of ourselves that we then have to create a wall because our deep psyche knows that our adult self is not going to be able to protect it in that arena. So let me talk about the first two stages, which I go into in greater detail in the last episode. Then I’m going to move into talking about the second two stages, the third and the fourth stage of this process of healing our walls to love. We’re going to go into those in more detail in this episode. The first stage is a state of kind of unconsciousness of our walls. It’s not just that the unaware people have that or the ignorant people. All of us have this. In fact, for me, it’s almost every day that I notice my walls to love in so many different ways. And usually, it’s kind of in the peace of my meditation time or in downtime that I have when I’m less revved up that I have this humbling experience of realizing that I dropped the ball or I missed a point to care about somebody.

The Opposite of Unconsciousness

And as I said, this happens for me mostly every day, and I treasure those experiences because I try to do something about them and then that helps my life and helps my relationships. But it is humbling, humbling how many things I miss, how many subtle push-aways I do without even knowing it. I just want to say that this unconscious state is something that all of us have, and the opposite of that unconsciousness is realization, a realization of if I did this I’d allow in more love. I’d accept this person more. I’d be braver in sharing who I am. So the first stage is one where we are just not aware of this yet. It’s a human stage, and I think we can always assume that we’re going to have parts of ourselves that are unaware. When we soften into ourselves more and more, and doing things like just listening to this podcast is going to help you soften your unconsciousness around your walls. My guess is that by the end of this podcast you will have a richer sense of what those walls might be and how to soothe, and heal, and transform them because it’s not rocket science. It’s deep. It’s powerful. It’s stuff that we don’t get taught, but it’s the simple tools of intimacy. So I’m very excited to talk about the third and the fourth steps in this episode. But the second step is the step where you become conscious of the ways that you push love away, and you’re also conscious of the fact that at this point you cannot necessarily really stop that. There’s a habitual quality to it. There’s a driven quality. There’s an entrenched quality.

Befriending Our Barriers to Love

And maybe you think, “Well, I’m just going to stop doing this,” and then you find again, and again, and again. For me, judgmentalness and irritation are two ongoing wall defenses that I have. And I tell myself every day that when I realize it, I could just stop. I’m just going to stop. But I can’t stop, and that’s not the way it works. Thich Nhat Hanh, one of my great heroes who is a Vietnamese monk who was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by Martin Luther King, and he speaks about this a lot.

He says, ” We can’t get rid of our walls. We can’t get rid of our anger. We can’t get rid of our greed, our jealousy, our hate. We can befriend it.”

And he really means that when he says it. And his monastics and the people who study his work make space for their walls. They make space for their anger. They learn how to do that. And I think that that’s a great, great thing. So that second step is that step of realizing “I have a wall”, and at this moment I can’t get rid of it. I can’t turn it into a door. I don’t know how to do that. I don’t have the tools to do it. I don’t have the capacity to do it. And here I am with this wall. But, I am seeing it, and that is a huge growth step. Now we’re going to move onto the third step, and the third step is being able to hold our wall places, our entrenched defense places, our walls against love with cupped hands.

Holding Our Barriers to Love With Cupped Hands

This is an image that I use a lot, and you might want to try it right now. If you take your hands and you imagine holding something. So just imagine you’re holding, let’s say, a wooden ball, a wooden ball, a polished wooden ball. You’re holding it. And now take your hands and make them really, really flat, completely flat next to each other and open. And imagine holding the ball that way. Well, there’s really kind of no warmth to that way of holding the ball, but you’re holding it. Now imagine squeezing really hard and holding the ball that way. And that kind of hurts. That kind of hurts because you’re pressing up against it really hard and you’re squeezing. Now, imagine taking your hands and holding this ball with cupped hands. There’s a kind of feeling of love that comes from that cupped hands position, a feeling of holding something with space, but also tenderness. When we can do that with our walls, well, that’s like the human definition of amazing because there’s a humility that that takes. There’s an imperfection in that. But there’s a beauty, and a truth, and a bravery. And maybe most of all there’s a caring enough about love to be willing to admit this. So this third stage is a kind of holding our walls, when we feel them, with cupped hands. I’m going to say something about what the fourth stage is and then come back to kind of enriching the explanation of this third phase. The fourth stage is developing a language and a skill set around working with and understanding that wall. But that’s going to be … Well, we’ll get to that one.

The Things That Came Make Us Numb

We’ll get to that one in a minute, but I just wanted to say what that fourth stage is. In this stage, in this third stage of this holding with cupped hands, sometimes what the wall might be is the feeling of “I feel nothing.” That’s been a wall that has been really hard for me. That’s been a signature one of my walls that has caused me great guilt and pain and concern in my life is the “I feel nothing place.” I remember many years ago someone who I was in a relationship with was moving from another country to come and live with me. I was shopping with a friend for bed linens and all the things we needed, and this was a few days before he was going to arrive. I had done a lot of shopping before, but there was more shopping I had to do. And I remember being completely numb, 100% numb. At other times in my life when really big things happened, I found that I would go numb and I would think, “What is wrong with me? Can I not love?” But no. It’s what I discovered by holding it with cupped hands is that that went away, and of course the feelings came back. I think that love and death are two things that are so big that walls happen really easily and naturally. I remember losing my uncle who I loved a lot and not being able to cry about it. I remember talking to a friend of mine, a very wise person, and he said to me,

“It makes sense that you’re not feeling anything because death is so big that you can’t just put your arms around it.”

Our Psyche’s Immediate Protective Response

Your arms will never fit around it. So you could be walking down the street five days from now and all of a sudden burst into tears because it’s so vast. It’s so deep. It’s so profound as love can be that we don’t get to control the volume level that our psyche determines we need to be at, and our psyche protects us with walls. So that’s been a big one for me. I don’t know if you’ve had a similar experience of this feeling of I feel nothing at times when there’s big stuff going on. But I worried in many ways that it was a sign that I just couldn’t love. Here’s something else as well that might feel like a wall but is actually something other than a wall, and it’s allowing space for an ebb and flow of feelings. I know that for me when I have a wave of deep feelings there needs to be a compensatory period of just integrating, or not feeling much, or vegging out, or just needing time. And when we feel that and we feel that need for space, and time, and integration, and quiet, and I guess aloneness or privacy with whatever it is we’re feeling at times, and this is something that highly sensitive people get a lot and often wonder, “Well, what’s wrong with me? Why am I shutting down? Why can’t I sleep spooning the whole night? Why do I have to stop holding hands at a certain point? What’s wrong with me that I can’t be like everyone else?”

Teaching Our Psyche How to Handle Our Barriers to Love

But people who feel deeply and profoundly need pauses and need to know that there’s going to be an ebb and flow not of their feelings necessarily, but that their feelings … But of an awareness of their feelings and that our feelings go subterranean sometimes and it doesn’t mean they’re gone. And in dating, this is really, really true. And most of us, or many of us, when we finally meet someone who’s good, and wonderful, and decent, and attractive, and we kind of realize that there’s just no question but that they really are kind of consistently interested in us, our feelings go away. I call this the wave of distancing, and I think that it is the greatest single saboteur of healthy new love, not because it arises but because we believe in it and we think our feelings have really gone away or that they were never there enough, instead of understanding that in the presence of the vastness of real potential love, our psyche has to do a lot of different things to help us bear the true risk of real intimacy, and one of them is pushing people away right at that point. I have been plagued by that, and it took me years, decades, let’s be honest, decades and decades to learn how to handle that wall of mine. I talk about that wall in other episodes, and they talk about the wave and what to do about it. I speak about it in my book, too.

Humanizing Our Barriers to Love

There are some ways that we can begin to hold these walls with cupped hands and understand them in deeper ways. One thing that we can ask ourselves is, “what part of me doesn’t feel right at this moment? What part of me doesn’t feel good?” Then we give room for whatever answer comes out because the chances are great that this is intimately linked to the unconscious wall that we have built. Another great question is, “what part of me am I now protecting?” And a really fabulous question to me, the key and essential question is, “what does that part of me want? How would it most want to be treated at this moment? What does it need?” This is the most fabulous, fabulous question because it gives us space to humanize our wall. So I know that for me I have places of deep timidity in my being, and those places need to not be touched or to be touched lightly and carefully again and again because I disappear. I can also be really intense and then that intensity creates other kind of walls. But one is a kind of timidity, a kind of quiet that I need and a kind of space that I need that when I don’t get it I go away. And this is the big, big, big part, when I can honor the feeling that’s underneath the timidity that’s saying, “I need space. This environment doesn’t feel safe. I need breathing room. I need to take a walk,” I’ve lost a part of myself. I have to find it again.

What Our Barriers to Love Are Made Of

When I can give myself space to do that, usually my wall … Because these walls are, again, they’re not concrete. They’re not steel. They are made of our flesh. They’re made of us. They’re made of our spirits. So when I can do that, and then when I can ask, “What does that part of me need?” then my wall begins to change. And we’re going to talk about this now more in the fourth step about what to do when we realize that. But this is the step that none of us are taught. This goes under the category of some phantom fear of intimacy issue I have that God knows hopefully one day I’ll be able to figure out instead of this exquisitely specific act of saying, “What part of me doesn’t feel right? What part of me doesn’t feel safe? What part of me feels nervous?” And you could even take a minute right now. And if you like, you could pause the podcast to do this, and just think of a time when you felt a wall up. Didn’t have to be a big dramatic wall, but you were shut down to a relationship or to a connection or to those around you. Go back there and ask yourself these questions: What part of me didn’t feel safe? What part didn’t feel protected? And what did it need? What did it want? These are the questions that when we ask our walls literally begin to deconstruct and we see the humanity that was behind them.

The Decalcification of Our Barriers to Love

In my work with clients and in my intensive, this is so much of what we do is seeing the walls, which are unconscious, helping make them conscious, go through that period of holding them with cupped hands, and then learning the language of them that’s underneath. And each one of you can do this. In your places of walls, you could say, “What’s the sanity behind this wall? What’s the valid reason why I had to put this wall up, and how can I protect the part of me that this wall is protecting?” Ongoing journey, step by step, but it’s a beautiful process. And when we don’t do that, that’s when the wall becomes calcified. That’s when it begins to feel like concrete. That’s when it begins to feel not like flesh but something impenetrable and hardened. That is what happens when we shame ourselves for the time we have a wall. I know people who in relationships, me included, very often will say, “Honey, I feel my wall. I feel my wall.” Then, my husband will say to me, “What do you think it’s about?” And I’ll try to find the words about what is it about and what do I need. I don’t always get it exactly right. But the minute I do that, I’m in so much better shape because I am not creating self-loathing. I’m creating self-dignity, and I’m somehow finding my personal path around whatever wall it might be that I’m feeling at the moment. The brilliant psychiatrist and theorist Winnicott talked about this concept of “good enough mothering.”

Good Enough Loving

That’s when all of the kind of psychological awareness was coming into the picture of kind of the intense role that parents and especially moms in those days played in a child’s development. A lot of mothers got really scared thinking, “Well, what if I’m not doing this well enough?” And his concept was “good enough mothering,” which was such a soothing and healing concept, which is that if you’re doing it kind of good enough, then it’s going to be good enough. And when we do good enough dating, good enough loving, but that does include recognizing and doing these steps with our walls. And then the next step, which is the fourth step, the step that we’re on now, the next part of that is to talk to the people we love, if they’re safe, about these walls because that changes things dramatically, dramatically. Because left in our own heads, we probably won’t necessarily, especially in the early phases, be able to work this out well enough. So such a hugely important thing in your relationships to be able to with the people you love, say, “Oh, this was my wall. That was my wall. Here’s where it’s from.” There’s a wonderful saying from 12 step programs which is “if it’s hysterical, then it’s historical.” In other words, if all of a sudden you get triggered to shut down, it’s going to be from something in your past.

Helping Love Flourish

These steps will save you from shame, stuckness, and kind of a calcification of self, and they will lead you to a more fluid ability to live, and breathe, and connect with the people you love, and they will give you problem-solving skills that are just so essential. And we’re not taught how to do these things. We’re not taught how to honor, acknowledge, and work with our walls and then build a personal language with the people we love that helps us navigate our walls and their walls. And when we do that, all of our relationships transform. This is one of the absolute greatest keys for helping love flourish and getting it to the point where it can flourish. So thank you so much for listening, and I look forward to seeing you in the next episode of The Deeper Dating Podcast.

The secret path to deep love is to understand your walls to love! Learning the secret language of our walls is what turns those walls into doorways. In this episode, you’ll learn the two keys to understand your own walls against love. And with that understanding, you’ll have the beginning tools to truly transform your entire intimacy journey.

Table of Contents

• The Four Stages We Go Through Before We Break the Walls to Love
• Awakening Our Consciousness About the Walls to Love
• Healing the Pains That Are Building the Walls to Love
• Opening up Our Walls to Love

Episode Introduction: Walls to Love

Every one of us have walls against intimacy and love that control our lives. In this episode I’m going to talk about the four stages that help you identify your walls to love and begin to transform them. So stay tuned to the Deeper Dating podcast. Hello everybody and welcome to the Deeper Dating Podcast. I’m Ken Page and I’m a psychotherapist and coach and the author of the bestselling book Deeper Dating. And today I’m going to be talking about something very, very profound. It’s our walls to love and a way to understand them and a way to heal them that might be new and very paradigm-shifting for you. Every week in this podcast I’m going to share the greatest tools that I know to help you find love and keep it flourishing and heal your life in the process. Because the skills of dating are nothing more than the skills of love. If you want to learn more about the deeper dating path to real intimacy, just go to deeperdatingpodcast.com. You can sign up for my mailing list and get free gifts and learn more about how to use these ideas to transform your own intimacy journey. You’ll also find complete transcripts of this entire episode. And I’m thrilled to say that you will also find my new downloadable Deeper Dating Course in which I guide you personally through all the steps and stages of this work.

Subscribe and Leave Ken A Review

Also, everything I share in this podcast is educational. It’s not medical or psychiatric advice or treatment for any condition. And if you’re experiencing any serious psychological or psychiatric conditions, please seek professional help. Finally, if you like what you’re learning here, I would love it if you could leave me a review on Apple Podcast and subscribe as well. So thank you so much for that. I think that one of the richest pieces of work in the intimacy journey that we can do is around our walls to love. This is a huge, huge subject. And I think that for most of us we can break that journey of healing and growth into four stages. In this episode, I’m going to be talking about the first two stages. And then in the next episode, I’m going to speak about the last two stages. And then at future points, I’m going to devote an entire episode to each of these stages, because each one is so rich and so important. But for now, let me articulate each of the four stages, and then jump in and look at the first two in greater depth.

The Four Stages We Go Through Before We Break the Walls to Love

So the first stage of the journey is not being aware of our walls. Our walls own us, and they control us, and they push love away. It’s us pushing love away, but we don’t know it. The second stage is actually recognizing our walls, which is a stage of great possibility, but it feels really hard. There’s a lot of pain there to confront and face the walls that are there. We get better and better at this and we develop more and more hope as we become more familiar with this process. The third stage is to look at this wall and hold it in a different way, to try to understand what caused it, to try to understand the language of this wall, how it is that it’s a deep part of us that is protecting us because we have not yet built up the skills to handle whatever is at the root of this in a wise, present, compassionate way. So, that stage of bringing compassion and insight, curiosity and questioning to the wall is a powerful, masterful, and complicated and human stage. And the fourth stage is developing a way around and through that wall. It’s developing a new language, so whatever needs that couldn’t be spoken, whatever protections that couldn’t be built, now have a language for what they need, what they want, and how to hold themselves, and how they want you and other people to hold them. With this language, we don’t need to have a wall. That wall becomes a door that we can open or close based on choice. These are the four stages. And now I’m going to talk about the first two.

The Walls to Love and the Walls to Intimacy

As a psychotherapist, I would say that perhaps the hugest piece of work that I need to do, that people come to me for help with is their walls to love and their walls against intimacy. I know for myself, in my personal life, that has been the epicenter of my entire intimacy journey is my relationship to these walls and healing and transforming these walls. Not knocking them down and getting rid of them, but understanding them, because these walls are not made of concrete. They’re not made of steel. They’re made of us, and when we can understand the creation of these walls and what leads to them and develop a language of compassion and insight and how to interact when we’re in the presence of those walls, our worlds change. But before we can do that, it’s a very kind of painful process to face our walls. And that’s the first stage. And that’s the stage that I’m going to talk about right now. So the first stage is kind of being unconscious of our walls, just not being aware of them. And that’s a really, really big one. We don’t even know we’re doing them. Jung said that, “all neurosis is a flight from suffering.” And when we can’t handle the pain that has spawned the birth of these walls, when we don’t know what to do with it, when we don’t have the skills to bear it, we wisely put up walls.

When Walls Become Doorways

Our unconscious when it knows that we don’t have the tools yet to deal with a piece of deep suffering, or problem, or interactive struggle, that we have with the world and our unconscious knows we’re not going to be able to protect ourselves wisely. Our unconscious puts up a wall for us to protect us. There’s not a door, there’s a wall. There’s a book with a wonderful title that I really love and it’s When Walls Become Doorways. And as long as our walls are not conscious, they can’t become doorways. They’re created by our psyches because there’s a place of deep unconsciousness around our suffering that keeps us moving, that keeps us blocking without even necessarily knowing it. I remember having a dear friend over, an elderly woman, and she came over and we were having kind of difficulties together. And I asked her what was going on, and she said, “Well, it’s hard to tell you, Ken, because you never light.” And I said, “What do you mean light?” It was a kind of old fashioned word. And she said, “You never stop and sit down and give us a chance to really communicate.” Now for me that’s an unconscious wall, is jumping to the next activity. That’s a way that I handle my pain. And it is a wall against love. It’s a wall against intimacy.

Addiction is an unconscious wall, one that causes a lot of harm and a lot of pain. And when we have a wall there is a way that we’re fleeing pain. So when we’re fleeing pain, there’s always a kind of neurotic quality. There’s an unconscious quality, there’s a rush in quality, there’s a lack of self love.

Awakening Our Consciousness About the Walls to Love

In 12 step programs, they have a phrase for people who are in the throes of addiction and they say, “You feel like a piece of shit in the center of the universe.” That’s what it’s like when we’re really owned by addiction. So that’s the first stage and it’s the stage where we’ve got walls and we’re not conscious about them. And let me just say that every human being that I’ve ever met is at least partly in Stage One. And that’s part of the gift of this work is learning to recognize, “Oh, there’s a wall here. I was pushing love away and I didn’t even know it.” And that is an amazing, amazing accomplishment when we can recognize this. And that leads us to the Second Stage. And that second stage is the stage of being aware of our walls. Now Vito Russo, the author, said this great line that I quote a lot, which is, “The truth will set you free, but first it will make you miserable.” And there’s a lot of pain attached to this stage of recognizing a wall. And that pain is there for a number of different reasons. Well, the simplest reason that it’s there is because we’re aware that we have a wall up against love. And that’s a sad thing and a hard thing – to admit that we are pushing love out. There’s a sadness that is so human and so deep, it’s part of the great pain of being human, is the facing of the fact that we’re pushing love away. It’s a kind of awesome revelation that can leave us dumbstruck and sad, and it’s what brings so many people to therapy.

The Point of Recognition

But when you get to the point that you recognize a wall, there’s a huge, huge accomplishment that has happened, and this stage is pivotal because this is a stage where we begin to transform the wall. It can’t really be transformed in the same way until it’s conscious.

The author, Stephen Levine, had a wonderful definition that he used of healing and this is what he called healing. “Healing means to enter with mercy and awareness. Those pains, mental and physical, from which we have withdrawn in judgment and dismay.” Those are two of the real feelings that we feel when we admit a wall. This feeling of judgment and dismay.

One of the closest friends I’ve ever had, his name was Michael. I’ve talked about him in this podcast before. He died of AIDS in 1991. I remember a number of years before he passed, we were sitting together and talking, and he said something that I don’t think I’ll ever forget. It was very stirring because it was really painful. And he said, “In my whole life…” We were kind of young then, so these revelations were kind of new revelations for us. But he said, “In my whole life, again and again, every time I’ve truly, truly let myself open up to someone, it’s been someone who never could love me.” I was struck by the beauty of what he said. I could feel the ring of existential truth in it.

The Turning Point

And he was crying at the time, and I felt brokenhearted for him and kind of in awe that he said something that real. That was a turning point for him. The acknowledgement of that wall changed his life. And somewhat soon after that, he found his life partner who he was with until he passed. There was something about the recognizing that wall that was so powerful. And I remember at a later phase, a number of years later, I had spent a good number of years doing the club scene and looking for love in all the wrong places, in all the wrong ways, looking for it through quick hookup sex, the kind of gay party culture of that time, which defined my way of searching for love and failed tragically and miserably and left me so empty. But I didn’t know that I was empty. I thought I was one step away from finding a love if I just tried harder again and again and again and again. And I remember the period where that began to shift for me. I was in a weekend workshop with a wonderful teacher and, whose name I’m not remembering at this moment, but it was a wonderful workshop. And I remember at one point facing the loneliness that I had always been running from. And if you’ve ever seen a kid get really hurt and be shocked and stunned and their mouth is wide open but no sound comes out, that was what the pain felt like to me. It was so yawning and so vast. It was like the emptiness came flooding to the surface. It felt really painful and really hard, but I knew even then, this is the beginning of healing.

Healing the Pains That Are Building the Walls to Love

It was the beginning of healing. It was the beginning of my stopping just running to chase love and finally learning how to build love, but it took that kind of yawning pain of recognizing this wall inside my being. So it was a gift of healing. Years later, Michael passed away from AIDS, but before he did, he was really sick for a long period of time, and I knew that his end was coming near. But I couldn’t feel anything. I had a wall. I had a wall. And that’s part of the pain of this phase, is this dismay, because when you’ve caught a wall up against love, somehow it feels like you’re betraying love. That’s a very painful thing. Or the sense of hopelessness and powerlessness that we feel when we face a wall and see a wall but don’t know how to change it yet. It’s a very powerless place, but it’s a wonderful powerless place. It’s the kind of powerless that I believe they’re talking about in 12 step programs. When you admit your powerlessness over a pattern that has controlled you, it doesn’t mean that you will never have the power to handle that. What it does mean is that your ways of handling it have not had the leverage that you needed. That the tools, mostly the patterns of trying to fix it, have just not been strong enough and don’t work. As a psychotherapist, you learn about the definition of crisis. Crisis is a particular phase in the growth journey and it’s a phase where you’re confronted with an obstacle so big that you do not yet have the tools to handle it.

A Difficult but Transformational Place

Now, this is a terribly difficult but transformational place because this is where our being actually has to develop new capacities that didn’t exist before. To handle this situation. When we face our wall and admit our wall and feel that strange kind of powerlessness around it, our being finally is liberated to invent wiser ways to handle the dilemma that the wall was originally built to fix. So I went into therapy at that point because I was just so dismayed by my wall of lack of feeling as my best, best friend was moving closer to dying. I think we had one session, and this wonderful therapist Harold Cuden said some words that helped me feel the place that of course existed inside of grief. The floodgates opened, and I was able to cry and cry and cry. It was such a wonderful feeling to feel human again around this pain. And it allowed me to connect to myself and to Michael. But it took this kind of strange acknowledgement that there was a wall here that I didn’t understand. So this second stage is actually a powerful stage of healing. And I have seen, again and again, when we hit up into our wall, when we admit our wall and acknowledge it, as helpless as we feel, as frustrated as we may feel, there’s a deep, deep intimacy bravery in that act. And in confronting our wall and in standing there without the tools to get through it, but doing it in an open way.

A Confrontation on Our Walls to Love

We’re going to talk about this in the third stage in our next episode with cupped hands, with compassion, and with an openness and curiosity, we will discover how that wall is actually made up of us and why we needed to create that wall. When we do that, when we confront our walls, it’s not only an act of bravery, it’s an act of opening, even though we can’t see that opening yet. This is one of the greatest miracles that happens in the intimacy journey is that when we face our with a deep desire to change them, somehow we find the tools to change them. That’s the heart and the soul again of why I believe most people come to me for help in their journey. So in the next episode, we’re going to talk about the last two stages. And again, in future episodes we’re going to talk more deeply about each one. But what I want to say is that all of us have unconscious walls. And for all of us, the act of saying I have a wall, as humbling and strange as it is, is the precursor. It’s the harbinger to a new life and a life that’s more filled with intimacy. Because this journey of recognizing our walls is not like an anomaly. It’s not just a problem we have to fix. Walls, to doors, facing walls, the experience of walls, this is the meat and potatoes of our intimacy journey. And it never stops. It’s not a problem that has to be fixed once. It is the amazing and humbling experience of the intimacy journey is that we hit walls again and again and again and again and again

Opening Up Our Walls to Love

And the more comfortable we become with this awareness of our walls, and the less shaming we are of ourselves, the easier this journey is. And the more that happens, the more we discover this amazing experience where our walls open up and begin to change. So then we stop feeling as dismayed when we hit a wall. We go, “Oh yeah, my walls, I got a lot of those. And they’re made of me, and I have some tools now to heal and fix and transform those walls.” So, thank you so much for listening. In our next episode, we’ll cover the next two stages in this process. And again, I want to encourage you that if you like what you heard in this episode to please subscribe and leave me a review, and I will see you next week on the Deeper Dating Podcast.

If you’re single on Valentine’s Day, this episode is for you. These 3 reasons for big hope may fly in the face of most everything you’ve learned about dating, but they truly lead to healthy, lovely, sustainable love. Enjoy each of these reasons, because they point to your new future.

Table of Contents

• How We Are Misled in Our Search for Love
• Becoming a Student of Your Attractions
• How to Stop Being Single on Valentine’s Day
• The Message of Hope

Episode Introduction: Single on Valentine’s Day

For single folk, Valentine’s Day and Valentine’s week can be a glaringly awkward time. Stay tuned to this episode of the Deeper Dating podcast for a message of hope for every single person who is not in a relationship and hopes to be in one. Hello, everybody, and welcome to The Deeper Dating Podcast. I’m Ken Page, and I’m the author of the bestselling book Deeper Dating and the host of this podcast. This is Valentine’s week. And in this episode, I want to offer a message of concrete hope for everybody who’s single, or dating, or not dating but wanting to find their beloved on this loaded day and week. In this podcast and every episode, I’m going to share the greatest tools that I know to help you find love and keep it flourishing and heal your life in the process. Because the skills of dating are nothing more than the skills of love, and the skills of love are the most important skills of all for a happy and meaningful life. And if you want to learn more about the Deeper Dating path to real intimacy, just go to deeperdatingpodcast.com. And if you sign up for my mailing list, you’ll get free gifts and you’ll learn more about how to use these ideas to transform your own intimacy journey. And you’ll also find a complete transcript of this in every episode.

Subscribe and Leave Ken a Review

If you like what you’re learning here, it would be a wonderful thank you if you subscribed and left me a review. So thank you so much to all the people that have done that and all the people who will do that. And finally, everything I’m going to share in this podcast is educational in nature. It’s not medical or psychiatric advice or treatment for any condition. If you’re experiencing any serious psychological or psychiatric conditions, please seek professional help. Okay, let’s jump in. Valentine’s Day is such a loaded day for so many of us. And when you’re single and it’s Valentine’s Day and Valentine’s week, there can be a kind of real pressure, or a sadness, or a sense of emptiness, or a sense of failure, or just really experiencing kind of a missing place where a relationship should be. And all the cultural pressured messaging that tells us about how we have to be with someone on Valentine’s Day certainly doesn’t help.

How We Are Misled in Our Search for Love

But I want to offer a very real message of hope to everyone who is single, looking for a relationship, and willing to do the deeper, richer work to find that. I want to start out with a quote that I just read from Elaine Welteroth who wrote More Than Enough. And I love this so much. She says,

“Don’t be eye candy, be soul food.”

And that’s what I want to start with in this kind of offering some thoughts of real hope. A little bit about how we are misled in our search for love and the pain that that leads to. All over the world, single people are being taught that the search for love is a race against time. A numbers game that favors the young and the beautiful, and that everyone has to become more witty, and more charming, and more sexy if they ever hope to find love and build a family in this world. And then through mass media, people are presented with this never ending stream of airbrushed, over-romanticized images of love. And then we’re invited to this endless banquet of new ways to meet, just about all of which are dehumanizing. And at the end of the day, this kind of soulless approach does not lead to love. It leads to insecurity and desperation. I want to say something about why before going on to a path that is more hopeful. This approach is doomed to fail because it diminishes our sense of self-worth.

An Inner Environment of Desperation

It makes us colder. It makes us less kind. It makes us more jaded. And then in the service of our goal, which is to find love, we throw our humanity and the humanity of the people we date right under the bus. Also, this approach creates an inner environment of desperation, which is then bonded with a deep desire not to show that inspiration. So there’s a kind of frozenness, an awkwardness, that we end up stuck with that ends up leading us to make bad choices. We become judgmental of ourselves and other people. And then also, it creates this unhealthy pressure to find the one. I remember being a kid and what Valentine’s Day was like then. I still remember it with delight and pleasure because you would make Valentine’s Day cards for all the boys and all the girls that you just liked, and you would end up with a big batch of Valentine’s cards. I still remember that, and I love it and I believe in it. This year, I plan to send out and give out Valentine’s Day cards to so many people who I love because there’s just such a sweetness in that. Marianne Williamson, who I quote often, said it so beautifully. She said,

“As I grow spiritually, my friends feel more like lovers and my lovers feel more like friends.”

So I just want to put this out that on Valentine’s Day we can think about the abundance of intimacy that we have and just do sweet things to honor that and celebrate it. I think it shifts the focus in really good ways.

A Wiser Path to Find Love

But in the broader picture, I believe that there is a wiser path to find love and that when we take this path our life changes and there becomes great reason for hope and there also becomes an experience of deeper radical self-love. I just want to talk about three things for everyone who is single, who’s looking for love that you can take on that if you do take these on they will profoundly change your search for love. They will profoundly increase the chance that you will find love, and they will absolutely make yourself, make you love yourself more. So the first is to stop playing it cool. There is this cultural tendency that we have to kind of suppress our excitement, our enthusiasm, our desire, our delight and turn it into some kind of more attractive and non-needy and less effusive kind of presentation of self, and that doesn’t really work. So instead of playing it cool, I encourage you to practice kindness, consistency, and availability. That’s work. That’s work to do those things. But when we do those things, our world changes. And in dating, we have definitely been trained to be cool and not kind. I often say that next has become the modern dating call. So that unkindness just kind of takes over. This is something I’ve spoken about in some previous podcasts about online dating. And yes, it is scary to show an extra degree of kindness and generosity. It exposes our soul. That’s exactly why we should do it because there is no better way to discover who is worthy of your core self.

Becoming a Student of Your Attractions

So the next time you’re on a first date, just try showing more kindness and more generosity from beginning to end. And then notice that person you’re with and if they match that, if they show that too, if they show that these are values that they live by and appreciate. So kindness doesn’t only help other people, but it leads us to meet kinder people and there’s a message of hope. The more you cherish and value kindness, the more you swim upstream against this cultural tendency toward coolness and coldness. The more you value and show kindness, the more you will meet kind people. Watch, you will see this happen. And it’s a great, great kind of harbinger of very valid and very real hope. So then, another thing that you can do this year to change your future in your search for love, and in love, is to become a student of your attractions. Because we’re taught that deep passionate love is found by following our most intense attractions. But it turns out that our most crazy intense attractions are often the fast track to personal hell. And anybody who’s really looking for real and healthy love has to learn to understand their patterns of attraction. Because if we don’t, we go out into the dating world unprotected and at risk. So if we take the time to look at the relationships that haven’t worked and this is something that I do. I teach in my book and in my upcoming, soon-to-come-out downloadable audio Deeper Dating program. I teach in all these ways that one thing we need to do is to notice and identify our patterns of attraction.

A Message of Hope

Because when we become a student of those patterns, we begin to refine them. And I promise you that without that you will slow the speed of your journey to love incredibly. And with that, with learning to articulate the patterns that work and that don’t work, and refining and changing those based on the inner wisdom and the wisdom of people around you that help you see a different path, you will change your world. Again, a message of hope. And when you do that, you will see a difference in your experience. Your field will actually begin to change. And this kind of hope is not that kind of empty hope of maybe the next person, maybe the next person. It’s a sense of hope that is fueled by, as they say in 12 step programs, there’s an acronym for GOD, and that’s good orderly direction.

When you take these steps, you will feel an inner fullness because you’ll be taking a process of good orderly direction in your search for love.

And the next step is learning how to build romantic and sexual intimacy in your healthy relationships. This is something I’ve spoken about a lot. But how many of us have lived in the experience of the people we’re most attracted to aren’t that interested in us? And the people who are crazy about us we’re not that interested in? And really, that experience is almost universal for single people, but it doesn’t mean we’re incapable of intimacy. It just means that we need new tools to navigate that kind of complex, almost universal situation. And we know that our sexual and romantic attractions can’t be forced, but we’re not taught that they can be educated.

How to Stop Being Single on Valentine’s Day

So as you take the steps of choosing to date only people who inspire you with their consistency, decency, goodness, and potential availability when you make that choice that that’s all you’re going to be looking for and that availability one is so damn sweet, and so is the consistency one. Because we can find people who are immensely available for transcendent connection but then just disappear. Or people who can love us in really deep and passionate ways but they have a boyfriend, or girlfriend, or wife, or a husband already. Because really, it’s hard for any human being to bear the heat, the beams of love in deep intimacy. All of us need to grow in our ability to do that. So if we kind of get into a pattern where we have this kind of luminous and explosive presentness and availability but it’s too much for us so we consistently hide behind unavailability, for example, we will look really fabulous to someone until we break their heart. So what we’re looking for and what I so deeply encourage you to begin discriminating, or continue discriminating around, is the consistency of someone’s presentness and availability. Now, that does not mean that there’ll be waves of fear, that they will have walls up. All of us have waves of fear. All of us have walls.

But it’s the kind of person who doesn’t disappear, who stays present and says, “Oh, I felt that wall up and this is what that was,” and stays willing to do the work, those are the folks that are gold and those are the folks that we want to look for.

The Walls That Are Made of Us

And when we learn to become that person, which means this kind of complex, humbling process of saying, “Oh, I’m feeling a wall. I’m feeling a wall now. I’m seeing a pattern now that doesn’t work,” and holding that with a sense of space and I’m going to be talking about this in a future episode about what do we do when we hit the walls in our intimacy life.

But the truth is that those walls are not made of concrete. They’re not made of steel. They’re made of us. They’re made of our hearts and our feelings that we’ve hardened because we didn’t have the tools or the skills to protect ourselves or to choose differently.

So as we learn those tools, our walls begin to melt and they become doors. As you do that work, your intimacy life will blossom. And this is the greatest message of hope, which is that as you do the deeper work, your intimacy life will blossom. That’s a promise. As you do this work, the people you meet will change, your attractions will change, and you will sense the hope of new possibilities. This is something that I have seen in doing this work because I’ve seen so many people find love who maybe were particularly challenged in some real and powerful ways, maybe because of their age, maybe because of disabilities, maybe because of illnesses. But by tackling this deeper, richer work and making themselves available and combining that with the magic ingredient of bravery, their worlds opened up and they found love. And I would say that was my story, too.

The Message of Hope

So I’m going to ask you right now to just take a minute and think. Did any of the things that were discussed in this episode open a door for you? Touch a space where you said, “Yes, I get that. I like that. I could commit to that. I could sign up for that piece of the journey”? Well, then that’s your sweet spot to focus on, and to change, and to open up. And the message of hope is this – As you do that, your dating life will open up. Your life will open up. That is the great and wonderful news about doing the work of intimacy. You change your luck. These tools that I’m offering here really do have the power to guide us to love. But not through that bone-crushing dating game that we’ve been taught we have to endure. So if you’re single, and if you have cared enough to listen through this entire episode, then I also want to say that you are lucky because you are someone who admits to yourself how important love is. Even if that admission might leave you feeling very vulnerable in this Valentine’s week. You’re lucky because you’re hoping and you’re willing to grow. And in fact, I think perhaps the greatest gift in any of our possession, something that we might not have seen as a gift, is our longing to find and grow real love. We’re taught that that’s a weakness. And also, longing hurts, we’re taught that it’s a sign of failure or non-self love. But really, it is not.

Willingness to Do the Work

Longing is a gift and a strength. It is very, very humbling, but it’s a deep, deep well of sustenance and growth. And it’s that longing that helps us get out of the gravity zone of all of our patterns and tendencies that push love away or keep us separate. Because when we feel that longing, it burns through that. We have to change, we have to grow, and we’re willing to do the work. And we all know that it’s the folks that are willing to do the work in this world that achieve the richest results. So this Valentine’s Day, I want to encourage you to take stock of the loves that are in your life and to appreciate those folks and even do something fun on Valentine’s Day with them. I encourage you also to take stock in the ways that you have committed to growth in your life and your intimacy life because there is no, no, better investment if you want to find love than that work that you’ve put in. And as you follow these ideas, you’ll see such changes and new possibility, and that will also be a message of hope for you. So I encourage everyone to kind of hold that message of hope and that commitment to do this growth work knowing that as you do your world will open up. So thank you so much for listening. I’d really appreciate it if you could subscribe, leave me a review. And I look forward to seeing you next week on The Deeper Dating Podcast.

Discover The Power Of The Two Minute Meditation! These tiny meditations will transform your dating life, hone your intuition, and allow Eros to blossom with the right person. Your innate intimacy wisdom is more easily accessible than you know! Discover it right now through these easy-to-learn, powerful-to-use practices.

Table of Contents

• Tiny Meditations You Can Try
• What the Weather Is Like Inside of You
• Mini Revelations Gathered From Tiny Meditations
• Tapping Into Our Deeper Wisdom Through Tiny Meditations

Episode Introduction: Tiny Meditations

It can feel so strange to be on a date with someone. In this episode, you’ll learn four micro-meditations that you can do in under a minute that will deepen your sense of safety, presence, and discrimination and make you more available for what could be possible with this person. So stay tuned to this episode of the Deeper Dating Podcast. Hello everybody and welcome to the Deeper Dating Podcast. I’m Ken Page and I’m a psychotherapist and the author of the bestselling book, Deeper Dating, and today I’m going to share with you just a few micro-meditations – mini processes that even if you’re not a meditator, you could do really quickly and will change the tenor of your dating life. Every week, I’m going to share with you the greatest tools that I know to help you find love and keep it flourishing, and heal your life in the process because the skills of dating are nothing more than the skills of love. Those are the greatest skills of all for the kind of life that we want. If you’d like to learn more about the deeper dating path to real intimacy, just go to deeperdatingpodcast.com. If you sign up for my mailing list, you’ll get free gifts, and you’ll learn a lot more about how to use these ideas to transform your own intimacy journey, and there’ll also be a complete transcript of every episode.

Subscribe and Leave Ken A Review

Also, everything that I’m going to share in this podcast is educational in nature. It’s not medical or psychiatric advice or treatment, and if you’re experiencing any serious psychological conditions, please seek professional help. Finally, if you like what you’re hearing here, I would love it if you could subscribe and leave me a review. Those mean so much to me. Thank you for that and let’s jump right in. I’m very excited to share these micro-meditations with you because they really will change the tenor of your dating life. They will help you get in touch with a deeper sense of personal wisdom and power and discrimination, and we all need those things deeply if we’re looking for love. Well, we all just need those things deeply, period. These micro-meditations are for anybody and you don’t need to be a meditator. In fact, in some ways, they worked so quickly, you could do them so quickly that they don’t have time to activate the fears that come up, the questions, the doubts, the insecurities, the laundry lists, all the stuff that can get in the way in longer meditations. They’re so quick and so instant, and they shift you in really important ways. They bypass a lot of the obstacles that happen for long term meditators, and I am a long term meditator. I love and adore meditating. I believe in it. It’s been an important part of my life for almost half a century. I’m a big meditator, but I’m a bad meditator. I’m a sloppy meditator.

Tiny Meditations You Can Try

I adore these micro-meditations, and these are micro-meditations that you can do before a date and on a date, and I think you’ll love them. I’m going to actually lead you in them as we do this or just at least describe to you how they’re done and you could do them yourself if you like or not, but there’ll be tools for your wiser toolkit of finding love. Okay, so the first is to set an intention. This is one I’ve talked about before and it’s really simple. What you do is before a date, even you can do this before you go to a party, an event, before you call someone who maybe you’re developing some interest in, before you go online. You can do it at all these different times and it’s simply this. It’s to think about what’s your cutting edge of growth in your dating life? Maybe it’s being a little more open. Maybe it’s being a little looser and having more fun. Maybe it’s being more discriminating. Maybe it’s being braver. Maybe it’s in terms of stretching who you’re going to reach out to. Whatever it is, you just take a minute and think like what’s your cutting growth edge? Then before engaging in whatever it is, you think of that, you picture yourself doing it, you honor yourself for that process, and then you go into the event or the experience with that as your intention. Then no matter what else happens, you judge your success by your ability to be this deeper, wiser self, and to follow through on this intention in your date.

Secrets of Tiny Meditations

Whatever happens with this person, you’ve got your intention. Let’s take a minute and think about this right now. One of the secrets of micro-meditations is the truth is, as we talked about in the last podcast, we have easier access to our wisdom and our depth and our flashes of insight than we normally realize.

We don’t have to look outside ourselves as much as we often think that we do.

Now I’d just like you to take a minute and think for you, these days, what feels like a growing edge for you in your intimacy life or your dating life? Take a minute to think about that, and if you want, you could even pause the podcast to do this, but I’m going to give you a moment to do it now. Good. Well, whatever that intention is, what I want to invite you to do is a tiny micro-meditation, and we’re going to do it right now. Picture that you’ve got your intention and you’re going to your next thing, whatever it is. Maybe it’s a date, maybe it’s a party, maybe it’s the next time you pop online or go to your app, but think of what the intention is. Think of it right now. Honor it because it’s the growing you, and every step you take, really truly, toward that growing you will move you quicker and more closely to the person you’re looking for. It’s really, really true how that happens. Picture yourself living that intention. Now, just imagine it. Just imagine you being that you that can live this intention, how that would feel.

Realizing Your Intentions Through Tiny Meditations

How you’d feel after having done it and what the connection would be like with yourself. If you were able to do that, and just take a moment and take pleasure in that, and that’s the micro-meditation. It is just setting an intention and then when you go to that event, you take a moment and you remember that feeling. You will hold it to your heart, and then you move in and you let that be your intention. That’s one, I think, very, very sweet micro-meditation. Now here’s another one that I really love. This is you’re there, you’re on the date, you’re on the date, and it’s what I call dropping down. Here’s what happens. You’re on a date, and I’ve talked about this too, but see, you’re on a date, and what’s going to happen if you’re anything like most of us is your head is going to spin with evaluations. How good does this person look to me? How does this person’s resume look to me? Are they too tall? Are they too short? Am I attracted to them? Is there some kind of creepy, weird thing that is going to come out that’s going to really bother me? Am I attractive enough for this person? Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. That kind of evaluative chatter that none of us can help or most of us can’t help. I in the past was never able to help that on a date. So that goes on and on and it’s all about am I good enough, is the other person good enough, and all of this evaluative stuff. I used to picture a little man inside me with an abacus counting on both sides about the other person and about me.

What the Weather Is Like Inside of You

That is just going to happen, but whatever the things are your head is telling you which really are going to be about how this person weighs out and how you weigh out, those are the things your head is going to be doing, but your gut, your deep insides, is going to have new and different information. If you drop down into your heart, into your gut, maybe you’ll need to step away for a moment. Maybe you’ll need to say you need to use the restroom. Maybe you can just do it on your own without having to get away. I know for me, a bathroom break was perfect for me when I did this to help me drop down into where I was feeling without the other person being right there. You drop down into what you’re feeling, what the weather is like inside you, what the chemistry of the connection is like, and what your feeling is like toward this person. When you do that, you can ask yourself this question that to me is a very central question. We’ll talk about this a little bit more. It’s this question, does my soul feels safe with this person? Now you won’t know the person that well yet, and God knows you won’t know for sure, but you’ll be able to notice the kind of climate inside. Maybe your head is telling you this person’s really, really attractive and I really like them. But when you drop down, you’ll say, “Oh, this way that I’m feeling like I have to prove myself” or, “there’s a coldness in the air that I’m trying to make up for with warmth.”

Testing the Weather

You will notice that richer timbre, that deeper layer of what the weather is like with this person, what the chemistry is like and what kind of ways it feels to be in this person’s presence. When you know that, it will tell you a lot. I’ll just share a story with you. There was somebody who I… This was a long, long, long time ago and this is the days that we did like the phone lines to meet up. On these phone lines where you would meet all these different people. It’s very much like swipe right, swipe left, but instead, you just pressed a phone key and moved on to the next person. There was someone I met and I thought he was amazing. I loved his voice. He really liked me. We connected, we connected. We talked for a really long time. We’d have these really long phone dates talking, and it went on for such a long time, and then we decided that we were actually going to meet. It felt like a big deal because as can happen, we felt super, super connected at that point. I remember going to this cafe to meet him and he described what he looked like correctly, but put all together, he was completely not someone I was interested in. Not to mention that he was wearing really strong Elizabeth Taylor for Men cologne and had a giant gold chain. I was so disappointed. I felt like, “Oh no, this can’t be. I’m so disappointed. We had so much.” I was very mad at myself for having waited this long to have this moment of truth happen. I said, I better do this dropdown exercise and I said I needed to use the bathroom.

Mini Revelations Gathered From Tiny Meditations

I went to the bathroom and I stood there, and I closed my eyes and I dropped down to what I was feeling. I was stunned to realize that I actually felt really warm and a sense of gratitude and a sense of liking this person. Now this was a complete shock. It was a mini revelation, but the act of dropping down gave me that surprise information, and I came back and we had a wonderful conversation. We laughed, we connected, and we dated for a while. It didn’t end up working out for different reasons, but that experience and the ones that came after that that were similar changed my life and changed my understanding, and led me to this micro-meditation. I’d love you to try this the next time you’re on a date. You notice what your head is telling you, but then you drop down into the feelings. The next one that I just talked about for a moment already, but I want to talk a little bit more about is this fabulous question that you can ask on a date, which is, “Does my soul feel safe with this person?” Now the caveats there that are really clear. First, your soul might not feel safe just because you don’t feel safe. Maybe there has been trauma, maybe there’s been fear, maybe there’s disappointment. Also, you don’t really know this person yet. Also, your soul could feel totally safe with someone who might become a friend, but that doesn’t mean you have to want to have a romantic relationship with them and I tell people this all the time.

A Glorious Thing to Do

It’s just so important to know you are not obligated to be in love or attracted to someone just because they’re good for you.

Those are all some of the reasons why you might be wondering about this question. Maybe you don’t like the word soul, and then you could just use the word heart, but let me tell you why, given the reality of all those caveats, it’s a glorious thing to do. I’ve talked about this before and I’ll be talking about it again, but the biggest reason is you will be honoring your tender self. You’ll be honoring the inner petals of your being, where your core gifts lie, where your deepest authenticity lies, and in that zone is where the language of your true romance place can speak and can catch on fire, and become alive or instead, be doused. It’s really the deep language of your heart that you are touching when you decide that your emotional safety really, really counts. When you make that the question, you will notice a lot. You will notice more easily a person’s tendencies towards superiority, toward distance, toward judgment. You will notice even more qualities of generosity, warmth, stability, and it will shift your focus, but we are not taught to do this. We’re taught you just look for someone you’re attracted to and they’re attracted to you and the pieces match up in terms of what you’re looking for, and then you hope and pray and watch to see if they are a good person.

Creating a Bond Between You and Your Authentic Self

This is a different approach and it works so much more effectively. It changes who you are and it rewires you, and it actually begins to heal wounds around your attachment style. Because what you’re doing is creating a bond between you and your most authentic self, your most vulnerable self, your most true self, where that part of you says, “Oh, I’m being listened to, I’m being protected, I am being respected.” When our deep inner self feels that, we are empowered, we are present and we are more available. I’d like you to try this micro-meditation and we could even try it right now. You could just think of somebody that maybe you’re dating or you’re interested in dating, but you’ve had conversations with. Think about this person and just take a minute to drop down into the feelings, the kind of weather inside that happens in the chemistry when you both are together. Not just when you’re thinking about them because when we’re thinking about them, afterwards, there’s going to be an overlay of our projections. When you’re in their presence, what’s the weather like? What’s the internal experience? Ask yourself just at this point, does my soul feel safe when I’m with this person by the way that they are and by the quality of the connection? Just try that now and see what comes up and what you notice. Good. Good. What did you notice?

Tapping Into Our Deeper Wisdom Through Tiny Meditations

Just take a moment to think about that. And I imagine that your intuition sparked, and you learned some really good things that you will follow through on seeing how they play out in the relationship, but you have tapped into your deeper authenticity and you have turned up the volume of your richer, deeper, most intimate self in this situation, and that is a great thing to do that will change your future. All of these things that we’re not taught about tapping into our deeper wisdom and discrimination. We’re taught so many things about how we have to make ourselves more attractive, how we have to be able to attract people in a different way, how we have to do this and we have to do that, but how many lessons are there in tapping into our deeper wisdom, which feels so good to tap into. It’s such a sense of there really is a journey here, and it’s a wisdom journey that I can follow and that validates who I am. Okay, so now we’re going to get to the last micro-meditation, and this is one that I only encourage you to do if your answers to what it feels like to drop down are positive. When you feel that in some way there’s a sense of safety and solidity with this person. When you feel that, and I always just say these reminders, which is that if you are intoxicated, you won’t know. You won’t be able to do this. If you or the person you’re with has a substance abuse problem, there will be an essential non-safety in the relationship.

Allowing the Winds of Arrows to Happen

Apart from those things, if you have this gut feeling like, oh, this is good, this person feels solid, they feel stable, they feel warm, there’s some sense of safety as I get to know them. If you feel that then you can practice this next micro-meditation. If you don’t feel that sense of safety, I encourage you to wait with this one, but it’s allowing the winds of Eros to happen. You’re with somebody, you have a good feeling about them. Somewhere inside you, and there’s some attraction. If there’s no attraction, you can’t do this and that’s fine, but there’s some attraction. While you’re talking to them, you allow those waves of Eros to wash over you and maybe they say you want to rest your hand on the person’s hand. You may do that. You may not do that, but you can have the fantasy or maybe other fantasies come up. You don’t want to get lost in them because you want to stay present in the moment. But you can allow the wash of Eros to color the interchange, which is a beautiful and exciting thing. It’s a tool and it’s a technique that if this is a good match, you’ll be using to deepen sexual and romantic attraction again and again through the course of your connection. There’s a way that we can actually be inside that stream of Eros and allow it to happen. Picture right now being on a date with someone. There’s some kind of physical attraction. There’s a sense of safety and goodness in the person and in your connection with this person.

Allowing the Sweet Eros to Color Your Feelings

Then you gently allow this wash of Eros to color your feelings, your connection with this person, and you just allow that sweet Eros to color things. It’s a volume dial that we have some control over. Just picture doing that and how lovely that feels, and that’s another tiny dating micro-meditation that you can do. Now if you are wrestling with issues of sexual compulsion, this is one to be careful with and one to get support around because you don’t want this to lead into getting sexual before it’s time to get sexual in the dating relationship. Because as I always say, sex too early is like miracle grow for our fear of intimacy. One party or the other, or both, are either going to want to flee or are going to start getting insecure, or needing, or longing in a way that doesn’t necessarily fit the stage of the relationship. Be aware of those things in practicing that last micro-meditation, but when you practice these micro-meditations, you will have a felt sense of your wisdom, a felt sense of your growth, a felt sense of your capacity to make really good choices in this arena and those things feel great.

Share Your Insights About Tiny Meditations

I encourage you to try all of them, and then you can go to deeperdatingpodcast.com and you can press ask Ken and you can tell us, tell the community, what your experience was like with these micro-meditations. Thank you so much for joining me in this episode of the Deeper Dating Podcast. Please if you like what you heard here, leave a review, subscribe. That’s a tremendous gift. It was wonderful to get to share these ideas with you, and I look forward to seeing you on the next episode of the Deeper Dating Podcast.

Fear of joy is the secret, universal guard at the gate to love. And no one talks about it. Improvement-fixation turns our gaze away from the love and joy already living inside us. Tapping into these feelings–right now–is the greatest intimacy-hack there is. It’s the nuclear path to love. Learn more in this episode!

Table of Contents

• BEAR versus BARE
• Learning How To Bear The Fear of Joy
• Dropping The Fear of Joy and Embracing The Love Inside Us
• Letting Go of The Fear of Joy Allows Quicker Access To The Beauty of Your Being

Episode Introduction: Fear Of Joy

What is often more powerful in your search for love than all of the self-improvement, self-fixing and self-healing that you could do? What’s a practice that almost instantly drops you into a deep space of your own brilliance in love? Stay tuned to the Deeper Dating podcast to learn more. Hello everybody and welcome to the Deeper Dating podcast. I’m Ken Page, and I’m a psychotherapist and the author of the bestselling book Deeper Dating. Today I’m going to be talking about something that’s profoundly important, and in many cases will have a bigger impact on your entire intimacy life than all the other self-improvement work that you could do. And it’s learning how to hold, and bear, joy and deeper intimacy. It’s a skill we don’t get trained in, but that has a vast and important bang for our buck. This week and every week I’m going to share the greatest tools I know to help you find love and keep it flourishing and growing and heal your life in the process because the skills of dating are nothing more than the skills of love. And if you want to learn more about the Deeper Dating path to real intimacy, just go to deeperdatingpodcast.com, and if you sign up for my mailing list, you’ll get free gifts and learn a lot more about how to use these ideas to transform your own intimacy journey. And you’ll also find a complete transcript of every episode. Also, I just want to say that everything I’m going to share in this podcast is educational in nature. It’s not medical or psychiatric advice or treatment, and if you’re experiencing any serious psychological conditions, please seek professional help.

Subscribe and Leave Ken a Review

And finally, if you like what you’re learning here, I would so appreciate it if you could subscribe and leave me a review. Some of the reviews are so beautiful and so touching. Most of them are actually, and I’d love it if you could add yours to that pool. So thanks so much and let’s jump in. This subject is tremendously exciting for me and so profound, and so, expect that there are going to be a lot of episodes around this very subject, and by the end of this podcast you, I think, will really understand why. What we’re we going to be talking about today is kind of counterintuitive and also counter to so much of what we learn in our culture. Constantly, the focus in the entire self-improvement and personal growth movement is about learning to overcome obstacles, perform better, improve our skills in all arenas and fix ourselves. And that is both fabulous and often an actual flight from true intimacy and true growth and true self-love. Because the truth is that at this moment all of us have almost kind of instant access, when we’re in a good place, to wells of love and meaning and profundity that are almost scary in their depth.

Bear Versus Bare

And the deepest work is learning to bear the joy that exists inside us already. And two different kinds of meaning of the word bear. One is the meaning in this quote that I love so much by William Blake,

“And we are put on earth a little space that we may learn to bear the beams of love.”

That kind of bearing and the truth that we don’t get taught is that all of us need to practice how to bear the beams of love. And when we do that, to get a little crude, the bang for our buck that we get in our intimacy journey is more than profound. In fact, learning to bear the beams of love that live inside us is perhaps the greatest act of self-love that we can do. And the other meaning of the word bare is B-A-R-E, because when we touch these parts of ourselves that can experience so much joy, so much tenderness, so much meaning, so much depth, so much love, we then need to learn to bare, B-A-R-E, those feelings in the world. It’s an act of generosity that draws such profound love, and this in a way is the deepest and most primary path to real intimacy because, you know, we can work on healing our traumas. Well, let me just take a pause here and say, “I’m a psychotherapist. I do trauma work. It’s a very important piece of what I do.” It’s incredibly powerful and important for us to work on our trauma. I do it all the time in my life. I do it with my clients.

The Flight From Joy

So this is not a disparaging of doing trauma work in any way, shape, or form, but it’s saying that often the deeper, richer, more immediate, more explosively powerful and beautiful work that we could do is learning to feel and bear, and bare, the beams of the love that is inside us already. So often we actually use our cultural obsession with self-improvement as a flight from the deeper intimacy that we kind of feel already. Jung said a beautiful thing, very, very powerful, very important. He said that “All neurosis is a flight from suffering,” meaning that when we don’t want to touch the sadness, the pain, the grief in our being, we get into these flight mechanisms where we try to rise above that pain.

But really what we’re doing is we’re fleeing that pain, and that will always end up putting us into situations where a circuitry of neurosis kind of takes over and doesn’t get us where we want to go. So I think this is deeply true, but I think also so much neurosis is actually a flight from joy, because joy is hard to bear.

And I’m going to read something from my book Deeper Dating about that. “When we feel joy or pride in ourselves, most of us feel uncomfortable and we try to minimize our good feelings. Oh well, everybody feels the same thing. Or we instantly parry our joy with a self-deprecating comment that degrades or minimizes the positive feelings we’ve just had. Joy is hard to bear.”

Learning How to Bear the Fear of Joy

We shouldn’t fool ourselves about that. It’s an almost homoeopathic process. Drop by drop, we learn to bear joy for longer and longer stretches of time. And that’s actually one of our greatest life tasks, to learn to bear joy. There’s a great cultural discomfort with joy and our voracious pleasure-seeking is often a mask for our fear of simple joy. And I went on to write, “joy frightens us. It makes our defenses quake. It almost invites a superstitious fear of the other shoe dropping.” We can bear joy for fleeting moments, but for most of us, self-appreciation or resting in joy all too quickly devolves into self-measurement. I was speaking with a dear friend, a very gifted sex therapist who I’m going to be having on this podcast, Mike Moran, and I asked him, I said, “What is it that interests you the most in your work around sex therapy?” And he said, “What interests me the most is that people, kind of no matter what kind of trauma they’ve experienced, almost always at some point and in some way can tap into a vein where they can experience sexual, deep connectedness, and I’m interested in how they can bypass the trauma and what that vein is that they can tap into where even with that trauma they can experience this wonderful sense of deep sexual connection and passion.” And I love that, and I think it’s a metaphor because all of us have so much trauma.

The Skill of Dropping Into the Space of Deep Love

It’s a traumatic world and the ability to drop into the vein that all of us have where we can right now feel deep love and then learn the skill of dropping into that space. That’s a skill that changes our lives right away and we don’t have to fix a heck of a lot before we can do that. I know for me I can drop into those spaces pretty easily unless I’m stressed or angry or worried or obsessing over my to-do list. When things are pretty much okay, there can be a conscious choice to drop into a stream of a much deeper space. There was a client that I worked with and I wrote about her in the book, and she was a dental hygienist. And in our work together at one point kind of very shyly, she admitted something to me. She said that in her work with her patients, she would sometimes just be working with them as a hygienist and she would be moved to tears. She would feel kind of such a deep stream of love in those moments, and I think all of us can relate to that experience. Watching a TV show, having some kind of a moment with someone we care about, reading a book. Sometimes maybe in our work where we drop into a stream of love that’s so big that she felt odd about it. She tried to put the brakes on. She didn’t exactly know what it was.

Basking in the Deep Stream of Love

But in our work together, she realized that it was this deep stream of love that actually identified a huge part of who she was, and following that stream allowed her to live in such a way where her life grew in richness and richness until she found her beloved. And that, I believe, is the seminal process of our intimacy journey. It’s to learn to drop into deeper love. Now that sounds really great, and there’s this quote that says,

“Love like you’ve never been hurt before.”

And I think that’s actually a somewhat scary quote because when we love like we’ve never been hurt before, we often get hurt again. There are lessons of love that lead to discrimination. We need to recognize the places where we feel hurt and unsafe so that we can honor them and then not make the same mistakes again. And we can’t pretend we haven’t been hurt, but I believe that the journey is to look for someone with whom we feel deeply and essentially safe. We feel like this person really is safe and consistent enough that I can do that thrilling and risky work of dropping down into my deeper joy, into those streams where there’s so much love, so much tenderness that they scare the hell out of me. I know that again and again with my husband I get to that precipice, to that edge, and it’s work. It’s beautiful work, but it’s scary work, to say, “I’m going to drop down. I’m going to get that next stage of vulnerable.” And he’s someone I trust deeply and profoundly, but it’s scary. It’s embarrassing.

Dropping the Fear of Joy and Embracing the Love Inside Us

And I think that in this culture showing and tapping into how big the love is inside of us, how deep that tenderness is, how aching the desire to give and the desire to receive is, that it’s just kind of embarrassing. And I believe that it’s a great and powerful privilege to do the work of learning to drop into the joy and the love that we feel already. Just telling ourselves that we should be able to just simply abandon ourselves to love all at once. Yes, yes, yes. A wonderful, wonderful thing. But for most of us in a safe relationship, we need to do that kind of in an ongoing way. This is not just a one-moment thing. It’s a life practice to learn to bear, and bare, the beams of love and to assume that it’s so easy that you’re like, “Oh yeah, of course. Right? I should just totally surrender to love,” minimizes the profundity of what love is, how bright it is, the genius in each of us that’s so out of the box, so vulnerable, so beautiful, so scary. The truth is that we don’t just need to get rid of our blocks against joy or love. We need to learn to bear the brilliance of them. The risk and the depth and the originality and the vulnerability of our love, and experience and grow in that wild risk of being able to reveal. It’s such a fascinating thing. It’s like a choice point in our growth life. At any given moment, what am I going to fix? What am I going to improve, or am I willing to drop down into the love that’s actually there right now?

Choosing the Better Question

And I think you can feel the difference between those two questions. And imagine what it would be like, more and more, to make the second question your gorgeous practice. And we’re going to do that right now. I’m going to offer you some questions that will help you to be able to go to that gorgeous edge where you are actually getting stronger and more skilled in both bearing, and baring, the beams of love. So here’s the process. I would just like you to answer these questions. You don’t have to write them down. You could if you like to, but you could just be driving and say them out loud, or running or walking or listening, just say them out loud, however you prefer to do that. Is there a joy or excitement or aliveness in you that has made you feel different? Like it’s too much, or like it’s too tender or like it’s too quiet for the world, or too bright for the world, and it’s made you feel funny. This is your nuclear point of growth. It’s nuclear. Just imagine a you that lives out of the genius of that space, that embodies it and knows it’s a tremendous gift and is not ashamed of its brilliance. Just imagine a you who lives from that space. And now we’re going to be talking about bearing the beams of intimacy.

Choosing a Safer, More Vulnerable Relationship

But remember that these practices are only for relationships that are essentially and consistently safe, because consciously choosing to open yourself, open the inner petals of your being, they’re very fragile, they’re very tender, and we need to know that we’re doing it with somebody who deserves that, because we’ve seen who they are in the hard moments, choosing to be good, to be decent, to be honest, to have integrity again and again. So, some questions, where, in romance or in sex do you hold back in terms of passion or in terms of sharing vulnerability? You don’t have to do anything with it, but just think of those moments and picture what you would touch if you dropped deeper, if you both felt and somehow expressed those depths in a safe relationship. I mean, that’s all of our dreams. When in a relationship, and again with someone safe, have you worried that you’re going to be too much, that you’re getting maybe too tender or too truthful or too passionate or the depth of your need or the depth of your desire to give just feels a little embarrassing? Those moments are our gold. When we’re standing at those moments, we are standing at the edge of our beauty. We’re standing at the edge of our deepest ability to love and to change the world and to touch people and to draw love. We’re standing on the edge of our magic. And with a safe person, when we can practice drop by homoeopathic drop to share those parts of ourselves, our world changes so much more powerfully and directly than the majority of self-fixing work that we can do.

Letting Go of the Fear of Joy Allows Quicker Access to the Beauty of Your Being

Now, once again, I just want to say if you have a substance abuse problem, if you have a psychiatric condition, if you have trauma that’s really blocking you, do that work, but do this work too because it’ll give you quicker access to the beauty of your being.

And one of the greatest gifts that you can give yourself in your personal journey, one of the richest and most exquisite and most telling portals to the greatest you, and to a life that is more filled with the love that you want, is deepening into and noticing these moments and then stepping into them.

Learning how drop by drop, homeopathically, to feel the ripples of our love and to express it. That’s simply the greatest gift and, it’s how we learn to bear, and bare, the beams of love inside us. Try these practices, but only in safe relationships, or with yourself alone, and watch what unfolds and how quickly it unfolds for you. So thank you so much for listening. There’s going to be a lot more about this in future episodes, and I’ll see you in the next episode of the Deeper Dating podcast. And once again, if you like what you heard in this episode, please do write a comment. Subscribe, leave a review. Those mean a lot to me and to other listeners. Have a wonderful week.

Listeners bring their most important questions about love, sex, dating and relationships to Ken–and get his personal direct advice in Ken’s Q and A podcasts. Once a month, Ken answers your personal questions about love, dating, sex and more. Today’s powerful questions include: I’m in a great marriage, but there’s no sex. Is that ok? How to use sexual fantasy to deepen erotic connection, and Is 22 years too big an age gap for a sustainable relationship?

Table of Contents

• Sexually Fantasizing People You Don’t Know
• The Sweet Spot Where Turn-On Meets Connection
• To Rock the Ship or Not
• Adding a Sensual Touch

Episode Introduction: Expert Advice From Your Deeper Dating Coach

What do you do if there’s a huge age difference between you and someone you’re interested in? And what about if you meet someone new and you really like them, but you’re just not sure you’re sexually attracted enough? I’ll be answering these questions and more in this Q and A episode of the Deeper Dating podcast so stay tuned. Hello everybody and welcome to the Deeper Dating Podcast. I’m Ken Page and I’m a psychotherapist and a coach and the author of the bestselling book, Deeper Dating. And today I’m going to be answering your questions about attraction, sexuality, dating, romance, and love. This week and every week I’m going to share the greatest tools and insights that I know to help you find love and keep it flourishing and heal your life in the process. Because the skills of dating are the skills of love and the skills of love are the absolute greatest skills of all for a wonderful life.

Subscribe and Leave Ken A Review

If you want to learn more about the deeper dating path to real intimacy, just go to deeperdatingpodcast.com. And if you sign up for my mailing list, you’ll get free gifts and you’ll learn more about how to use these ideas to transform your own intimacy journey. You’ll also find complete transcripts of every episode on that website. I also just want to say that everything I share in this podcast is educational in nature. It is not medical or psychiatric advice or treatment. And if you’re experiencing any serious psychological symptoms, please seek professional help. Finally, I’m so appreciative of your comments and feedback which have just been so beautiful and it would be a wonderful thank you if you could subscribe and leave a comment as well or leave me a review. So thank you so much for that. Let’s dive in. Here is the first question.

Sexually Fantasizing About People You Don’t Know

Speaker 1: Well, this is a funny way of leaving a question, but it’s cool. My question is about if you’re making this transition to attractions of inspiration and you’re in process of this sort of slow build of finding someone beautiful. I’ve been listening to some of your podcasts because I’ve been in this experience. What if you find yourself sort of sexually fantasizing about people that you don’t really know or that don’t represent that type of relationship, more than thinking about this new person. So I sort of intuitively feel that it’s a process of adjustment like you’ve talked about, and it’s kind of normal that I would sexually fantasize during self-pleasure about attractions of deprivation-type people or hot people or something like that. But I guess the anxiety is about whether my attraction will grow big enough to feel satisfying within the new relationship, which I sort of think can only happen with time. And I don’t really have the evidence or time yet because we’re apart for a while. But in the situation that it happens to be, we’ll be in different places for a while. So I think I just have to hold tight and wait and see. But I’m just curious that I feel very intentional about this orienting towards this attraction of inspiration and this kind of warm feeling that I have toward the person and letting the sexual piece grow gradually. But I’m also just curious about these other fantasies that are more hot and what I’m used to. So I just wondered what you would say about that.

Transitioning Towards Attractions of Inspiration

Ken: Well, I love this question and thank you so much for your bravery in asking it. It’s fabulous and this brings up a number of very rich points. The first thing I want to say is that I think that your approach is a really good one. You have warm feelings about this person, you’re excited by this person. Something feels like it’s growing and there is some spark and you are giving that space instead of just saying, “Nope, not enough.” You can’t make a spark where there’s no spark and it’s kind of a self-torture process to try to do that. But where there is a spark, there are things that you can do to help grow that. And what you’re asking here is, “During masturbation, during self-pleasuring, I’m fantasizing, but I’m not fantasizing about this new person with whom I have warm and potentially growing feelings. I’m fantasizing about these hot people who maybe were actually attractions of deprivation instead of attractions of inspiration. Is that okay and are these new feelings going to grow for this person?” First of all, I want to say, of course it’s okay. And if you put a cap on your desires that are other desires, that’s not going to be good for you. It’ll make you resent things and it’ll block the freedom of Eros and Eros has a quality of freedom in it that we just have to allow and enjoy and take pleasure in.

Cultivating a New Circuitry

At the same time, you are cultivating new circuitry, you are built and we can do that. This is what no one teaches us. Is that you can cultivate healthier sexual attraction circuitry. You can’t force it, but you can cultivate it. So what I would say is keep doing what you’re doing, but add in some other stuff. Think about this new person and think, “Well physically, what would I like to do with this person? Are there ways that I would like to touch or be touched? Are there things that I would like to do?” Maybe you’ve got some wild fantasies that you feel great about doing with some hot person who is not a partner, but feel kind of awkward about sharing. Maybe this stuff is kinky or it’s wild. And so you feel like, “Well, I could do this with a hookup or I could do it with someone I don’t really respect, but with someone I treasure and have these warm feelings with. I feel hesitant to reveal that.” But really, baby, that is where the fun comes in, is having your wild fantasies with someone you treasure and who treasures you. I mean, that’s just pure joy.

Cultivating the Seedlings of Turn-On

So what I would say is in your self-pleasuring, in your masturbation, let yourself also think, “What would I like to do with this person? What’s a wild fantasy?” And maybe the fantasy isn’t so wild. Maybe you’re just at the place where all you want to do is touch lips or who knows what? You might have some crazy fantasy about things that you’d want to do. Maybe you would want to look at this person naked, but not have to do anything. Maybe you would want this person to do something to you.

Let yourself cultivate these seedlings of turn-on with this new person and then those seedlings water themselves and grow. Then you can reach the point where you can actually do them with this person and share them with this person and that is very exciting. I am assuming there’s a spark here. If there is no spark here, as I said, it’s not kind to yourself to try to make a spark where there isn’t a spark.

Where there is a spark, you get the joy of playing with that spark and using your fantasy life to imagine things. Maybe not things that you would do quite yet, but just the act of pleasuring yourself and imagining these things is creating new neural and sexual circuitries. That’s a great, great thing. So I think you’re really in a wonderful path – celebration for the fact that you are making a commitment to only, only cultivate attractions of inspiration.

The Sweet Spot Where Turn-On Meets Connection

I would say gradually, win yourself away from constant fantasizing about attractions of deprivation and bring the juiciest part of those fantasies to your current, new growing relationship without feeling like you have to force that. Allow yourself to play and experiment and be loose and find the sweet spots where turn on meets connection and warmth. And when you do that, you’ll be cultivating this whole new circuitry that will serve you well in this relationship or in a future one. So thank you for that question. Let’s move on to the next question. The next question didn’t come out clearly in the recording, so I’m just going to paraphrase it and it’s someone who said, “Ken, you tell us that you should really let yourself stretch past your previous points of I want nobody younger than this or older than this because if it’s a really wonderful match, that’s a really wonderful thing.” This person said, “You talk about four years or five years, what if there is a 22-year age difference?” Here’s what I want to say about that. There are absolutely challenges that come with an intergenerational relationship, which that would be, but there are challenges that come with every relationship. And I do think that as long as you have your eyes open to what those challenges are and, as long as both of you have the character traits of honesty, availability, willingness to work on things, willingness to reveal who you are…

Character, Character, and Character

And did I mention honesty, I’ll mention it again….. and the ability to work on things and the commitment to work on things. As I often quote the advice columnist of Psychology Today, Hara Marano, she says there are three things that are the most important in determining the health or the quality or the viability of a relationship. And those are character, character and character. That is what I would say to you. If you and your partner are willing to do the work, and I don’t know if you are 22 years older or 22 years younger, but if you are willing to do the work and if those basics are there and if there is not an unstabilized psychiatric disorder. In other words, many people have psychiatric disorders, but if they address them and reach stabilization, well that’s a wonderful thing and that makes for a viable relationship when somebody can do that. And that there is no active addiction, there’s no abuse, there isn’t dishonesty, there are the things that really create a treasured relationship. Then I say, “Go for it!” That’s my advice there. The next one I’m going to paraphrase as well. This is from someone who is over 18 but still very young, who is a gay man and who says, “I am looking for a soul filling deep connection and I’m having the hardest time in the world trying to find it. The apps have been incredibly disappointing. People say to me, ‘You’re too young, go out, have fun, play around, and you shouldn’t really be looking for this yet because you’re too young. Just have fun at this point.’ What do I do? I want a really deep relationship.”

Understanding What Matters Most

Well, what I want to say to this person is three cheers for you. Your depth is obvious and your sense of values are so obvious. And you know, I say all the time, some of us know from early on that we’re looking for an attraction of inspiration and we’re to do the work to find that and we don’t want anything else. The rest of us have to find out the hard way because we chase things that feel like they’re love, but they’re really not love and they’re not attractions of inspiration. I want to acknowledge the loneliness of your road being so young and making this commitment, but I want to celebrate your amazing understanding of what matters most. So what I would say to you is, and I’m hoping that your family is supportive of you, I would say to you that probably the best thing to do is to find those precious people who are kind of more values-based than a lot of the other people that you might meet online, and online can really be a trap, and I’ll talk about that more at another point. But for now what I would say is maybe your a college, has a Gay-Straight Alliance, a GSA or an LGBTQ group. Definitely, definitely, definitely join that, assuming that you’re in college. There may be another LGBTQ young person’s group. If so, that’s a fabulous thing. Join it, join it, join it, get there. That is the best way to meet like-minded people.

Cut From the Same Cloth

Also, think about, and these are the same kind of pieces of advice that I would say to anybody of absolutely any age. Go to events with people who share your values, even if it’s a pain to get there. I want to, of course, remind you to be careful and safe in how you meet people and who you meet. And what I would say is if your interests are, let’s say for example the arts or maybe sports or spirituality or anything, anything at all, see if you could find in-person groups with LGBTQ people who are a part of that. Also, you can use your online life in a different way and you can look for groups on Facebook, and elsewhere, that include LGBTQ people who share your interest, maybe even a young LGBTQ people’s groups on Facebook and elsewhere. So what I would say to you is your heart is in the right place and you, as you have said, you’ve already worked on identifying core gifts and one of your core gifts, I would say is, your deep understanding of what matters most. So three cheers to you.

To Rock the Ship or Not

Next, we have a very rich question about a wonderful marriage without sex. Here it is. Nomita: Hi, Ken. My name is Nomita. My question is that I’m at a place, I’m married to my husband for now 20 years and we’ve definitely lost the bedroom spark for the last 10 years. My question is that with a lot of inner work, I’m in a very happy place and so is he. He’s evolved very well. We actually have amazing family dynamics with our two kids and us, but we have separate bedrooms. The question is, is there any need to work on being in the bedroom, that intimacy, together? I frankly don’t see any reason to rock this ship that is amazingly moving forward in personal growth for both of us. Thank you for this opportunity, and I look forward to your answer. Bye. Ken: Nomita, thank you so much for this brave question. It’s a fabulous one and I’m really glad to address it. I think that the research shows that 10 to 20% of marriages are sexless and I want to say first – you have created a family bond and a spousal bond that works and is beautiful. You have articulated that the two of you have done a lot of work already in your own journey and that things feel beautiful for you both as a couple. So that’s amazing and kind of no words to really say what a big accomplishment that is and what a gift that is. Can a relationship be sexless and still wonderful? I really think the answer is yes, absolutely. That’s it.

The Sacred Pact

You had a sex life that was active for a decade. That means that this is not someone that you’re not attracted to or haven’t been attracted to. So somewhere there, there can be a spark and so many of us need to… Well, let me just back up for a second and say that a relationship can feel really good, but then when sex comes back or is added in, it feels even better. It’s like this sacred pact that’s like this feeling that your most intimate, vulnerable personal parts are treasured by the other person. There’s this feeling of a bond, the cementing of the specialness of the bond that gets so reinforced by sex, by good sex, by connected sex. That might be a gift that your relationship still could use.

The thing about sex in a relationship is that we often get comfortable with our partners and our Eros gets domesticated. And Eros is like a spark that needs to jump a gap. There’s something edgy about it, there’s something raw and naked and something awkward that can go against the domesticated feeling and that’s why we love it.

That’s an interesting question, is how might it rock the boat? Is there an issue there that hasn’t been addressed or looked at? That might be something that you both might want to gently begin to talk about. Here’s another thing, whether or not you and your husband ever become directly sexual again, I would deeply encourage you to go for the sensual.

Adding a Sensual Touch

Do you hold hands when you’re in the car together? Do you hug? Do you cuddle? Do you stroke each other’s cheek or faces? Those little things are hugely, hugely sensual and erotic and capture so much of the message of, “Oh my God, you are truly precious to me.” And that message is just so nourishing for each of us to get from our partner. So what I would say Nomita, is add those things in. If they’re there already, maybe they could go even a little bit deeper. Maybe you hold hands already at times. Maybe if you’re holding your husband’s hand, lift it up and kiss it and hold your lips there kind of conveying a message of what he means to you. Add in sensual touch because that often regrows the seedlings of Eros. If you had a sex life going on for 10 years, it is somewhere under there. So you might want to play with that gentle sensuality and see if the stirrings of Eros happen again. Even if they don’t, that kind of cuddling and touching and sharing the message that this person is special and desirable to you and that you care intimately. That’s a message that you don’t want to lose because that’s a big part of the magic of a romantic relationship. Thank you so much for that question Nomita.

A Ring of Truth

So these are all the questions that we have time for today. I hope you have food for thought and I actually want to ask you right now to take a moment, all the listeners just take a moment. What related to you in this? Was there any message that had a ring to it that spoke to, as the Quakers say, spoke to your condition? Take a moment to think about that. Whatever that message is, and maybe it wasn’t even something I said, but it triggered an insight for you. These insights, these moments where there’s a ring of truth, are precious. They are kind of our guideposts in our intimacy journey. So just take a moment to think about, was there one or more than one for you? I wish you all the best. Again, if you like what you heard, please do subscribe, leave a review, and I look so forward to seeing you on the next episode of the Deeper Dating Podcast.

Here is the path to save yourself from the most harmful dating mistake of all. As you learn the specific skills I teach in this episode, you’ll find yourself becoming more wise, more available for real intimacy, and much more likely to find wonderful romance. These are the dating wisdom-lessons that heal your life as they lead you to love.

Table of Contents

• The Magic of Online Dating Is the Curse of Online Dating
• Rewiring Your Sexual and Romantic Attractions
• Escape From Harmful Online Dating by Looking in the Middle Zone
• Imagining the Love You Want Saves You From Harmful Online Dating

Episode Introduction: Harmful Online Dating

In the last episode, I talked about what might be the greatest mistake we make in using online dating to find love. In this episode, I’m going to teach you what that is, and what you can do about it to dramatically speed and ease your own search for love, and grow deeply in wisdom at the same time. So stay tuned to this episode of the Deeper Dating Podcast. Hello everybody and welcome to the Deeper Dating podcast. I’m Ken Page and I’m a psychotherapist and a coach and the author of the book Deeper Dating. And today I’m going to be talking about tools that you can use to help protect yourself against the biggest mistake that we are trained and taught to make in online dating. This week and every week I’m going to share the greatest tools I know to help you find love and keep it flourishing and heal your life in the process because the skills of dating are the skills of love and the skills of love are the greatest skills of all for a happy life. And if you want to know more about the deeper dating path to real intimacy just go to deeperdatingpodcast.com. And if you sign up for my mailing list, you’ll get free gifts and you’ll learn more about how to use these tools to deepen the intimacy in all aspects of your life as well as to speed and ease your search for love. You’ll also find complete transcripts of this and every episode on that website.

Subscribe and Leave Ken A Review

And I also just want to thank everybody who has left me wonderful reviews, I truly, deeply appreciate it. And to encourage you that if you like what you’re hearing here to also subscribe and leave me a review. And finally, I just want to say that everything I share in this podcast is not medical or psychiatric advice or treatment for any condition. And if you’re experiencing any serious psychological conditions please seek professional help. Okay, let’s get started. In our last podcast we talked about what I think is maybe the greatest mistake that we can make in our online dating life and it’s one that we are sculpted to make and here’s what it is. It’s when the joy, and the excitement and the dopamine rush of finding a new, exciting someone eclipses the work of looking for that right someone and then taking the time and the space to cultivate that. Now that has two different parts to it. The first part is that in online dating it’s very easy to keep searching or to keep swiping and to do that quickly and to do it in a way that doesn’t allow us time to notice who’s there. Also, what we tend to do when we do that is we just look for our kind of “scratch the itch” type, the people who excite us the most, and we are less likely to look at the people with whom potentially there could be a spark.

The Magic of Online Dating Is the Curse of Online Dating

But because they’re not as immediately exciting and because it takes work and because there are risks attached we just keep swiping or searching for that closer to what we want someone and don’t take the time to cultivate those people who might be in the middle range as opposed to the most absolutely exciting range. So, all of the circuitry that is the courting circuitry, the circuitry where you get to know someone, you take the time. And when you do that just like in the old days of courting you wouldn’t just go toward immediately meeting. There would be somebody you would meet, maybe you would meet them at friends, maybe you’d meet them at a social activity, who knows where, but you would gradually get to know them. And when we do that, and this is such an important point, these tendrils of connectedness, these ways that we become romantically drop by drop specialized in someone, the ways in which they start to feel like home, the ways in which we start to fantasize about them or have imaginings about them, or have warm moments with them. All of which are these necessary steps to cultivate real intimacy except in those cases where we’re wild, freaking out, immediately intensely attracted. All of those steps that cultivate intimacy are bypassed. And that’s why it’s like the next chip syndrome you just want the next chip, and the next chip, and the next chip and you don’t really even take the time to taste the chips you’re eating after a certain point.

The magic of online dating is the curse of online dating and that is the wild number of possibilities that are out there and the excitement of so easily being able to find the next new.

Going Against the Grain

So by doing the work that we’re going to be talking about in this episode, because I’m going to give you in this episode keys to be able to go cross direction from what our culture teaches us to do. It’s like really going against the grain it’s really going up a down escalator or down an up escalator, really riding against not only a cultural tendency but a technologically fueled tendency and shaped tendency that keeps us looking for the next, the next, the next. We’re going to be going against that grain. And when you do that you will know, “I’m doing the deeper intimacy work, I can feel it. I can feel the solidity in this, I can feel the slowness in this, I can feel the humanity in this and I know I’m doing something wiser.” And you will be doing something wiser and that is a great feeling. And I’m going to be talking in this episode about specific ways that you can make that happen. Particularly I think the swiping apps are fiercely and compulsively addictive. You just swipe, swipe, swipe, swipe, swipe and you’re swiping left, you’re swiping left, you’re swiping left and who knows who you’re missing because it’s a quick, quick process and lots to say about that. But what I want to encourage you to do is to slow down. Marianne Williamson said that,

“People don’t realize that life in the slow lane is really pretty fast.”

And I’m encouraging everybody to just move a little bit more away from the compulsive “next” tendency which is so seductive and toward a slower kind of process.

Two Distinct Circuitries

So, let’s start at the beginning with this. When you are searching or when you’re swiping the most important thing I believe, and this is what I teach in all dimensions of dating, is that you look for inspiration and you know the signs of deprivation. Because as I talk about often, we have two distinct circuitries. One circuitry is that a little touch, a spice of deprivation is very exciting. We have a job to do, we have a hunt, there’s a hunt feeling with that. There’s a feeling that our self-esteem wounds are going to get met by these people, and so much of this is unconscious, are going to be met by those people who don’t automatically really, really like who we are or are judgemental, or superior, or unavailable. We want to chase that, that’s human instinct. But we have another circuitry too, where we can be attracted to goodness, to beauty of character, to presentness and availability and it’s a different circuitry and it’s one that we need to develop a taste for. Some of us know this automatically and naturally, and the people who do know this automatically and naturally are very, very frequently in good relationships. The rest of us have to learn it and we have to learn to rewire ourselves and that is very, very doable. This is this hugely important thing that we do not get taught that we can gradually, over time, educate and rewire our romantic attractions. And the work that I teach here will make that happen for you.

Rewiring Your Sexual and Romantic Attractions

As you do this work, even just the work that we’re going to be talking about in this episode you will be, and you’ll feel it, rewiring your sexual and romantic attractions toward wisdom, away from pain, away from unavailability and that’s a beautiful, beautiful thing and I guess it’s the most beautiful because it will truly change your future. So when you’re searching you look for inspiration and you find that in many different ways, but ways that you won’t notice unless you slow down. You look for a warm glow in someone’s face. You look for words in their profile that show a kind of extra level of honesty, an extra level of generosity, of love of life, of truth-telling, of whatever it is, the qualities that inspire you. You slow down and you look for that in people’s faces and in their presentation. Now, unfortunately, we are all taught to do this presentation trick of being a little extra funny, a little extra slick, a little extra sexy, a little extra cool looking and those are all masks for our authenticity. So, sometimes very wonderful people don’t show that in their profile fully because it’s just not cool, so that’s another piece that we have to get through. And in another episode we will talk about profiles and how to create a profile that really shows and reflects the real you, but for now when you’re searching or when you’re swiping take the time to look at profiles. Take the time to get a feel for someone’s face and not just sexiness and gorgeousness but quality.

The Most Important Thing

Hara Marano, the advice columnist for Psychology Today, who I interviewed on this podcast, said it best. She said,

“There are three things you need to look for, the first is character, the second is character, and the third is character.”

And I love that and I think it’s true. The way that I teach this in my coaching, and in my intensives and in this podcast is to say, to ask yourself, “Does my soul feel safe with this person?” And to have that be your primary question. Now obviously you’re not going to know that from one quick swipe and you’re not going to know that from one quick profile but when that becomes your primary question a few amazing things happen. One, you literally begin to rewire your attractions because research shows that someone who meets the goals that you have as most important will be both more noticeable and more attractive to you. So over time, we begin to shift our attractions. Also, we activate our sense of discrimination. When that becomes your question and you can do this in online dating, it doesn’t happen necessarily right away, but when you do this you will be activating your discrimination. You’ll be noticing those things that don’t feel right, that feel slippery in somebody, or unhealthy, or dishonest or superior acting. When you make that your question you will notice those things. Also, you’ll notice inspiration and that’s something we really need to do is develop an eye for inspiration. You’ll be with someone and you’ll say, “I feel a sense of warmth with this person. Yeah, this is strange. I feel a sense of safety with this person. I don’t know what that’s coming from but I sense that.”

Building Wisdom in Your Search for Love

And when that’s true, let’s say somebody who is not crazy attractive to you but there’s some spark, when you notice that you’re going to get somewhat more attracted to them and that’s the work of building wisdom into your search for love and you’ll feel it too. You will feel the development of wisdom as you do this which is a great thing. So, here is another piece on that. When you do this, when you make this your question, you dignify your authentic self. There is a way, if you picture it, even if you picture it right now in your dating life thinking, “Does my soul feel safe?” And making that your paramount question. Think about how that would make you feel differently, how you would date differently, how you’d feel inside differently. My image of that is like a straighter spine, a comfortably straighter spine. Because there’s a dignity and there’s an honoring the core of our authenticity. And when you do that something else is going to happen, people who appreciate that will notice you more, people in general will respect you more because you will be creating a container that dignifies your soul in your search for love and the ripple effect of that is intangible but very, very real. So here’s another one. Someone said to me that if you have a goal that’s really important to you, you need to assume that you’re going to have to budget time, money and commitment.

Escape From Harmful Online Dating by Looking in the Middle Zone

So, what I want to say to you is that it’s very easy to swipe. It’s very easy to search, it’s very easy to grab for the next chip, to look for the new next, the new excitement, the new conquest, the new match. What’s less easy is to look in the middle zone, people who there could be a spark with, to take the time to look for inspiration in their face, in their profile, if those things are there. And then, there’s all this work attached to it and there’s all this risk attached to it. Because first you have to interact with that person. Second, that interaction might lead to some chatting and then it leads to a phone call so you have to allow time for a phone call which these days is something that’s not nothing. You have to allow time for a phone call, maybe for two phone calls. Then you have to set up a date and then you have to cut time out of your schedule to make that date and then who knows what that date is going to be like. It could be really boring. The person could be really attracted to you and you’re not to them which is really awkward. You could be attracted to them and they’re not interested in you which is painful and difficult. Or it could just be plain boring. Whatever it is though it’s something that needs to be budgeted for. And then there’s making dates and getting to know the person.

The Next Syndrome Seduction

So all of these things what I’m suggesting is that you take the time to say, “I’m going to budget for that extra time because it matters. It matters hugely because this is about my happiness, this is about my future.” Folks, this deserves your precious attention maybe almost more than anything else and the research shows that the quality of our spousal relationship affects the quality of our life more than just about anything else. So what else deserves the treasure of your time as much as that? And God knows our time is a treasure. Here’s another thing too that’s really interesting is that so many of us think, “Yeah, well conceptually it’s important but clearing out space in our schedule that’s a harder thing to do.” So, we don’t really clear out the time in our schedule. We see people online, we swipe and maybe we’re interested, maybe it’s a match or we see their profile and we maybe respond to them or maybe we don’t, because there’s someone who might be easier, and quicker and sexier down the road, just right around the corner. But let’s say we do see someone who’s somewhat interesting, not like rip your heart out thrill because those people we will take the time with but someone who might be more mid-level but it feels like there’s potential. So we say, “I’ll do that later because I don’t really have time.” Because we haven’t budgeted the time for that. “So I only have a few minutes so I’m going to keep swiping, I’m going to keep searching.” And so, what happens is because we don’t have the time we are again in a new way seduced into the “next” syndrome – next, next, next, next, next.

What Will Help You to Stay Aligned With Yourself

Because it’s exciting, it’s quick and because we don’t really have the time for more. So there you are in this strange world of online dating, this world in which there is a vast, vast, vast number of possibilities, but also people behave badly. That’s something we’ll be talking about more at a later point. But it’s a crazy, crazy world and it’s one that sucks us in in so many ways. Again, we’re just talking about this one aspect of the speed and the “next” syndrome so we’re just talking about that for now. But what will help you to stay aligned with yourself in this hugely unaligned and compulsive and wild west kind of world of online dating? Well, I’m going to offer two more thoughts before we close. The first is the Inner Mentor Process™ which I do every day and I encourage all of my clients and intensive members to do it as well and it’s just one of the sweetest processes I know. So we’re going to do it right now. And it’s going to be around your online dating life and it’s going to be about your next wisdom step and you’re going to generate that from your own inner wisdom. So what I’d like you to do is picture now a you who is living in intention, a you who is dating from that place of, “Does my soul feel safe?” A you who allows for the time of deeper connection, a you who does this in a sober, wise, powerful way. This is a you who knows what matters. This is a you who is available to love, to your own heart, to your own journey, to the things that matter most to you.

Imagining the Love You Want Saves You From Harmful Online Dating

This is a you that is less distracted and you don’t have to be this you. I just want you to imagine this you. It’s like a you who’s full of wisdom, and full of love and really grounded. It’s like the you you’re meant to be. It’s like the you that you aspire to become. So you don’t have to earn that but just imagine that you. Imagine what that person’s face looks like, and what it’s like to live inside that being – this fabulous you that you were born to be, that you were meant to be. This is a you that would handle online dating with grace, with wisdom, with strength, with clarity, with presentness, with warmth, with the things that matter the most. So picture that you and now I just want you to jump in and imagine you ARE that you. Which in one way you don’t have to earn it it’s just an imagination but in another way you know it because that’s you, it’s you. So you step in that flow of this fabulous essence of you that you’re meant to be, and from this place you look at the you of today who is struggling with online dating. From this fabulous place of being so connected to yourself, what’s the wisdom that you want to share? The guidance that you want to call out to the you of today? One piece of wisdom for their online dating experience that’s going to help them do this better? Take a minute. Now this is not that you think, “Well what would that me say?” This is like you jump into that you which is a fabulous feeling, and from that place you craft the words.

Living Out Your Intentions

What do you most want to say? And see what that is. Well, whatever that is and if nothing came up now it may come up later and that is pure wisdom from your inner self. And I encourage you to take a post it and write it on there and maybe put it on your screen or use one of those virtual post-its but, do something so that you can follow that piece of wisdom and make that your intention. And that’s the second other tool that I want to give you is every time you jump in to online dating try to remember your intention. Maybe the intention is going to be “slow down”. Maybe it’s going to be, “Does my soul feel safe?” Maybe it’s going to be, “I’m looking for inspiration.” Maybe it’s going to be, “I’m taking the time.” Whatever it is what’s your next wisdom step? And maybe it’s what your inner mentor just told you. When you make that your intention in your online dating life it changes things because then your goal is not just to find the right match, your goal is to grow and become the person that you want to be which changes everything and matters most of all. So, that when you do online dating that you actually have a wisdom intention, whatever that is, whatever that wisdom intention is, and you hold that in the mark of your success in each particular time that you dip in to the world of online dating that becomes the mark of your success.

Moving Closer to Your Inner Mentor

Now, we’re not taught these beautiful things but as you do this you will feel wiser, you will like yourself more, your results will change, and that’s a really fabulous thing. And you will move closer to being that person you just imagined, your inner mentor. So try these processes. Go to deeperdatingpodcast.com and let me know your experience with them. You can actually leave them, there’s a microphone icon under Ask Ken and you can leave them on that microphone or recording which I could either play, or not play, but get back to you in the podcast. So try these exercises. Consider making this shift away from the way that we’re sculpted and trained and toward intimacy with ourselves and I’m telling you, you will speed the process to finding healthy, real love as you do this. That’s pretty much a promise. You will speed the process to self-love and to finding healthy love and those are good and great things. So thank you for listening and if you like what you heard please do subscribe and leave a review. That’d be a great gift to me. It was wonderful to get to share these ideas with you and I look forward to seeing you on the next episode of the Deeper Dating podcast. Thank you.

Sadly, we’ve all been trained to make the most harmful online dating mistake of all. This almost universal mistake blocks us from finding love while tricking us into thinking that love is right around the corner! Learn just what this mistake is, and what to do about it. If you’re doing online dating, do not miss this!

Table of Contents

• The Pre-design That Triggered The Online Dating Mistake
• How Testing the Waters Lead To An Online Dating Mistake
• The Next Syndrome: A Phenomenal Online Dating Mistake

Episode Introduction: Online Dating Mistake

There’s one powerful mistake that we are sculpted to make in our online dating lives that actually keeps us away from love. When we change that, we dramatically increase our chances of using online dating to actually find love. Stay tuned to this episode of the deeper dating podcast to learn what that is. Hello everybody and welcome to The Deeper Dating Podcast. I’m Ken Page and I’m a psychotherapist and the author of the best selling book, Deeper Dating. And today I’m going to talk about how you can approach your online dating life so that it can lead you more directly to love, steer you away from pain, and actually bring you wisdom and intimacy insights and heal your life in the process. Because the skills of real dating are nothing more than the skills of intimacy. And the skills of intimacy are the greatest skills of all for a happy life. So I think you’re going to be hearing some really exciting and important ideas in this episode, and in the following episode. And if you want to learn more about how the deeper dating path can help lead you to real intimacy, just go to deeperdatingpodcast.com and if you sign up for my mailing list, you’ll get free gifts and you’ll learn more about how to use these ideas to transform your intimacy journey. And you’ll find complete transcripts of every episode as well on that site. I also want to thank everybody who has left me reviews because there have just been the most amazing reviews and I cannot thank you enough for that.

Subscribe and Leave Ken A Review

And if you like what you’re hearing today, if you could leave me a review and subscribe that would be just wonderful. Also, everything I share in this podcast is educational in nature. It’s not medical advice, it’s not treatment for any condition. And if you’re experiencing any kind of serious psychological or psychiatric conditions, please seek professional help. So let’s jump in. This is really important and hugely, currently relevant material. So online dating, such a huge subject and some people only do online dating because of its benefits and some people won’t touch it because of its flaws. And there really are good reasons for both. I find as a psychotherapist and a coach that one of the most powerful ways that people avoid finding love is through compulsive, online dating. And paradoxically, one of the most powerful tools that exists in this day and age for finding love is online dating. So in this episode I’m going to talk about what I consider to be perhaps the biggest problem with online dating. The biggest way in which online dating actually sculpts and creates and generates loneliness. And in the next episode I’m going to talk about what to do about that. I want to talk a little bit about what to do about that in this episode as well. So as not to leave people hanging. But I think this is an incredibly, really rich, rich concept.

Using Your Online Dating Experience in Two Different Ways

They say what fires together wires together, and online dating actually wires circuitry within us that keeps us away from love in very, very concrete ways. And we need to know what those ways are so we can actively work against them.

And that’s what I’m going to be talking about because you can use your online dating experience in two different ways. You can use it to intensify the behaviors that you do that lead you away from the kind of love that you dream of or you can use online dating to actually grow in your ability to have intimacy. Because this is the bottom line and it’s the heart and soul of everything I teach. The way we date needs to be making us more skilled at love. The lessons that we need to be learning are the lessons that are going to help us when we’re in a relationship to hold that relationship to its highest possibility to grow and to sustain intimacy.

Identifying the Source and Pruning the Field

If we’re not deeply growing in intimacy skills through the way that we’re dating, then we’re not dating right. And this arena is one where we can do really, really conscious work. So, first of all, I think that online dating is designed, consciously or unconsciously, to keep us engaged in the search without finding love. It is true that the owners of these sites stop making money when we find a relationship. But it’s also true that they make their sites more sexy and more exciting by keeping up the dopamine rush of the next possibility….. the “NEXT” possibility. And it’s that “next” syndrome that really plagues so much of our dating lives and is the cause of so much jerky behavior. Why did that person just disappear? Well, they disappeared because there’s 50 “next’s” right after you. So that’s part of how online dating is built. It’s exciting. It’s exciting to see who’s interested in us. It’s exciting to know that there is a giant and vast pool of super sexy, super interesting love potential candidates just waiting there for us. And who knows what we’d stick our fishing rod in the water, what we’re going to pull up next. And we are enticed by the possibility of our “scratch-the-itch” type, the type that we are so interested in. And that’s why we love, love, love to go back to the sites, back to the apps because of that possibility. It’s so exciting to find somebody new and sexy and to have a new love interest, that’s just so exciting. And that, then, on some level becomes the goal because when you take the next steps, they’re boring, they’re frustrating, they’re scary in at least some ways.

What Fires Together Wires Together

But this is pure deliciousness. So we begin to develop a new circuitry because what fires together wires together, and there’s a dopamine rush. There’s a rush of excitement in grabbing what we want. Slight detour – some people experience this intensely if they have porn addictions, they will search and search and search.

They will hunt for that just right person, that just right act, that just right moment in a scene, and it will feel real to them. Success will be finding that, and then there’s this entire thrill of the hunt, but it’s nothing. It gives us nothing.

And so too, with online dating, the excitement of, “Wow, A potential new person.” It’s just pure delight. There’s a sense of hope, a sense of expectation, a sense of sexiness. And that then actually becomes a reward unto itself, so that unconsciously we get sculpted to seek that joy instead of a relationship because it’s so much easier and it’s so much prettier and it’s so much shinier because someone who’s not real is always easier than someone who’s real. And another little segue way here – A few years back, I was interviewed for an article on a new generation of apps where you actually fall in love with the virtual person and have an entire relationship with them. That becomes your primary relationship and they learn the things you want to hear, the things that you want to be able to say to them and how they should respond. Their responses get sculpted and everything is robotic, but it feels like beautiful, safe, real love. And that captures so much of the essence of how we are sculpted in our online dating life. The thrill of the hunt becomes its own entity.

Malnourished Romance

And there was a Star Trek episode that a friend of mine told me about. I don’t know the exact details, but it was something about how there was food, but the food felt like food and it made you full. But there was no real nutrition, there was nothing in it, like no sustenance. So you’d be full all the time, but you would literally be dying of starvation. And in a sense when we get lost in an online world without taking very specific actions, which further the process to get it out of those loops and into real-time, our loneliness builds and builds in a deep down level underneath. Even though we’re getting sated, we’re getting fulfilled by those successes of people being interested in us who we’re excited by. But let’s just think about this for a minute, and I’m leaving hookups completely out of this. But there you are at any given point online and there’s somebody who maybe could interest you. They may not be your total scratch-the-itch type, but they seem interesting, they seem possible. But there’s like countless new people waiting behind that person. Countless potential swipes that you can do. So you’ve got somebody right in front of you who’s within the realm of possibility, but they may not be your exact type. That’s number one, so they’re a little less exciting, let’s say. Even though this might be your soulmate, what would you have to do? You would have to interact with them, you would have to read their profile, you would have to slow down the speed of everything. You would have to interact and see what they’re like, maybe they’re jerks, maybe they ignore you or reject you or hurt your feelings.

How Jumping to the “Next” Can Be an Online Dating Mistake

Then let’s say you get to the point where you actually communicate with them on the phone or via texting. And that communication can be creepy, it can be tiring, it’s time-consuming. The person might be a jerk, they might be scary, they might fall for you really quickly and then you realize you’re not interested and then you have to hurt their feelings. Then you have to set up a time to meet and you could be wasting your time. They could be not right for you, you could get there and you see that you’re totally not attracted to them. And there’s always someone a million times more attractive right in the next swipe. right in the next profile. And so you think maybe, well I’ll get back to this person at a later time, but you never really do because you keep searching because it’s easier. And there’s less chance of risk that way, there’s still the potential of a super exciting next. And at this stage, none of these nexts demand, any kind of work whatsoever. So I just want to talk a little bit now about that “scratch-the-itch” person because that’s really our big deal here. So imagine your attractions, the people who turn you on and don’t. And imagine there’s a spectrum and the people who are at the really, really low end – the zeros, the ones, the twos. You just know that you are not attracted to them and you pretty much never will be. And then there’s the mid-range people where there could be a spark, but those people just they aren’t as exciting really. It’s going to take a little bit more work to get yourself to take those steps.

Swiping Left And Missing Your Soulmate

Unfortunately, that’s where so much of the gold might lie. Somebody I know said to me, he said, it’s just the strangest thing you’re swiping, swiping, swiping, and you’re swiping left, you’re swiping left, you’re swiping left. And then all of a sudden… And you’re doing it so quick, you could have swiped left on your next soulmate. And he said, it’s so poignant to think of that, and I think that that’s so true. So getting back to this then there are the people who were the eights and the nines and the tens. Those are the people that you’re like, “Oh my God, I really want to get this person to be interested in me.” You are unequivocally sexually attracted to them. There is this spark of like, “Yeah, that’s who I’m looking for.” There’s a few interesting points here, but one of them is this, couple’s research shows that the people who turn you on in that fierce way often do so because they embody the worst characteristics of your primary caregivers or the people who have injured you the most or withheld their love from you in the most painful ways, and something inside of you wants to go back to that scene of the crime and get that person to love you right. Now this is so subtle, it’s so subtle you might not even be able to articulate what it is about this person. Some kind of subtle musculature in their lips and around their eyes, a look that they have, something, that somehow unconsciously tells you this person’s not going to be available or they’re going to be almost available.

When the Scratch-The-Itch Type Takes the Backseat

And there’s really very few things more compelling than getting someone who almost really, really loves you. Who does really care about you, but not enough to commit or has good character traits, but then also ones that really, really don’t work and you want to fix them, you want to repair that. That’s really sexy. So what we’ve discovered is a lot of times those eights, nines and tens are those people, but we don’t realize it consciously. Now, that’s not always true, and it is a wonderful thing to be immediately turned on to somebody. But the truth is, and research shows this, the more you get to know someone, the more that “scratch-the-itch” type issue diminishes. And the more the actual chemistry of the connection takes on importance. Now, I’m not saying you’re going to be attracted to someone you’re not attracted to. What I am saying though, is that you can build a spark when a spark is there. So these sites are designed to have us ignore the fours, the fives and the sixes, or to say, “Oh, maybe I’ll be good and respond to them.” But we don’t really do it, ever, and I know this from my own many, many years doing online dating, how easy it is to do that. Fool’s gold glitters and it glitters really brightly. So I’m articulating just one tiny piece of what doesn’t work in the online dating world and hinting in that as to what can work. And we’re going to be talking more about what can work in what does work in the next episode, just around this specific issue. There’s so many other ways that online dating presents both a wonderful, wonderful opportunity and also a quicksand of possible problems.

The “Next” Syndrome: A Universal Online Dating Mistake

And I’m going to be talking through future episodes about many of these. But this is the one I wanted to talk about today, it’s the “next” syndrome. It is the being enticed away from people who truly, truly, truly, truly could be potential relationships. Like that person who seemed maybe there was a little spark, maybe they had a nice profile. If you were at a party and you were talking to two or three people and that person was one of the people. And you talked for maybe half an hour or an hour. Well, you might find that person’s not right for you, but you might find chemistry growing. You might find that this person is really exciting, but the vast, vast numbers of possibilities in online dating combined with that, like you can’t just stop at one potato chip. You have to keep swiping and swiping, and searching and searching combined with that way that our behavior gets sculpted together keep us lost in online dating, and we can save so much time by changing our patterns. So I’m just going to say a little bit about that now, and talk about that in a lot more detail in the next episode about what you can do to change this pattern. And in so doing truly rewire your circuitry so that you’ll be the kind of person who’s more available to real love when it comes your way and more likely to find that real love. What I’m going to encourage you to do in the next week is to notice your behaviors. Notice how what I described happens for you, just allow yourself to notice it.

Love Based on Scales

Like where are you swiping too quickly? Where are you just looking for the eights and, the nines and the tens because they’re so exciting, and not noticing the fours, and the fives, and the sixes and spending time on those? Who are your types that excite you the most and what’s been your experience with those “scratch-the-itch” types? These are all things to think about. And also where do you drop the ball in the process of exploring a new possibility with a new someone? Because it’s just so much work and it’s so much risk and, it’s a pain in the neck and there’s always a million juicy new possibilities waiting for you on your app, or on the website that you go to. So I’d like you to just think about these things because you are going to be learning to go against that cultural current and develop true and juicy intimacy wisdom. And that wisdom is going to help you profoundly in your dating life, and also help you profoundly when you do find love. So this week before our next episode, notice what your patterns are. And I want to encourage you to notice where you drop the ball on people who could be a potential really good match and maybe begin to shift that. Don’t drop the ball. And I’ll just say one more thing about that.

When we have a goal that really matters to us, we have to commit time, energy, and often money toward that goal. I’d like you in your thinking to budget time for the follow up steps with the people who might be potential yeses.

Till the Next Episode

So a lot to think about. Thank you so much for listening. This is exciting stuff. And in the next episode we’re going to be talking about the work-arounds that will help you be able to use online dating to your advantage. So stay tuned to the next episode of The Deeper Dating Podcast in a week, and I’ll see you then. Thanks so much. And also, once again, if you like what you heard here, it would be a fabulous gift to subscribe and leave a review. Thanks so much. Sadly, we’ve all been trained to make the most harmful online dating mistake of all. This almost universal mistake blocks us from finding love while tricking us into thinking that love is right around the corner! Learn just what this mistake is, and what to do about it. If you’re doing online dating, do not miss this!

Our needs are our most human parts. They are the key to our greatness, our passion, and our ability to love. But we’ve all been shamed for these precious parts of ourselves. In this episode, you’ll learn how to stop burying your needs; and instead to embrace them; to parent them with growing wisdom. That’s when we finally become able to “bear the beams of love.”

Table of Contents

• Burying Your Needs for Love
• Why You Take the Route of Burying Your Needs
• The Cost of Burying Your Needs
• Honoring Your Needs Is Enriching Your Life

Episode Introduction: Burying Your Needs

When we bury our needs we steer a path away from love and toward unhappiness. In this episode, you’ll learn how to excavate your buried needs. And how to dignify, honor, and see the worth in them so stay tuned to the Deeper Dating Podcast. Hello, everybody, and welcome to the Deeper Dating Podcast. I’m Ken Page, and I’m a psychotherapist and the author of the book Deeper Dating. And today, I’m going to talk about burying our needs, what happens when we do that, why we do it, how we can know when we’re doing it, and how to stop burying your needs, and the profound shifts that will happen when you do stop burying your needs. This week and every week, I’m going to share with you the greatest tools that I know to help you find love and keep intimacy flourishing and heal your life in the process because the skills of dating are the skills of love. And the skills of love are the greatest skills of all for a happy and rich life. If you want to learn more about this work, just go to deeperdatingpodcast.com. And if you sign up for my mailing list, you’ll get free gifts and you’ll learn more about how to use these ideas to transform your intimacy journey. You’ll also find complete transcripts of every episode.

Subscribe and Leave Ken A Review

Also, everything I share in this podcast is educational. It’s not medical or psychiatric advice or treatment. And if you’re experiencing any serious psychological symptoms, please get professional help. And by the way, if you like what you’re learning here, I would love it if you could subscribe and leave a review. People have left the most beautiful, amazing reviews, so many of them, and I truly appreciate it. And if you could leave yours if you like this work, that would be a tremendous gift. Okay, so let’s jump in. This is such a rich, and fascinating, and amazing subject. You know, there’s a term in journalism which is burying the lead. And what that means is that you tell the story, but you leave out the juiciest, most important part, or you minimize that. Well, for us, the juiciest and most important part … of our being is our needs. Now, this culture shames us. It “needs shames” us. And it’s understandable that that happens because needs are very tender. They’re very intimate. They’re very personal. They are dependent to some degree not only on us, but on the rest of the world, so they’re really vulnerable.

And this culture that prizes independence so greatly tends to diminish the importance of our needs.

But, the needs that we have are not just selfish needs. They are the needs to touch and be touched, the needs to connect with life. The needs to give, the need to have our gifts recognized, the need to create.

Burying Your Needs for Love

There are so many, the need to love. There’s so many needs that we have, and our needs are such a rich part of who we are. Eros in the biggest sense is not just about sex, it’s about the richness of life. It’s about our appetite for life, and our needs live in the heart of that kind of broad Eros. So, I want to share an image with you. It’s going to be a little bit of a map for the whole journey that we’re going to be taking in this podcast around our needs. So, picture a target. And if you’ve read my book or heard my work, you’ve heard this image before. But, picture a target with a few rings inside it. The closer you get in toward the center is the closer you’re getting to your deep authenticity, to what I call the beating heart of your humanity, your vulnerability, your beauty, your passion, your longing, your tenderness, all of your creativity, all those parts of you. Those are very alive, and very heated, and very vulnerable parts of you. So because they’re vulnerable, we build defenses and protections. So if you picture that the further out you go in this target the further away you’re getting from that mysterious and amazing heated core of your own heart and your being, you become more airbrushed. You become more defended, more protected, more avoidant. And as we go further out in that target,

As we protect ourselves more and more, the world becomes colder and emptier. The closer in, the warmer, the more heated, the more passionate, also the more risky. The further out, the less risky, but ultimately the more alienating and lonely.

Why You Put Your Needs in the Backseat

So because the heated core where our needs live is so fierce, asks so much of us, we protect ourselves by playing it cool. And we kind of bury our needs so that other people don’t see them in their full intensity, their full passion, their full neediness because that’s hard to do. So we cover them up, and then we might even go as far as to bury them. And when we bury them a lot, or when we’re ashamed of those needs, we start to bury them in ways that even we can’t find them and they become kind of like buried treasure. And of course, we do this in subtle ways all the time. It’s such a rich, rich area to consider. Where are we doing it consciously? Where are we thinking, “This is a part of me. These are needs that aren’t going to get met by this person so I’m just going to kind of put them on hold, put them on the shelf”? And where is it deeper and less conscious than that? A feeling of shame and embarrassment where we don’t want to look at those needs and we feel humiliated and mortified by them? We experience them as pathological, or dangerous, or just embarrassing. Well, when that happens, when we can’t honor those needs, that’s when they go subterranean. And when they go subterranean, that’s where the deeper problems happen.

Recognizing the Source of Your Anger

I know for me this has been such a revelation, such an important thing to realize that I bury my needs. And the image that I had of that in my life was if you picture a stone jetty going out to sea, deep, far out to sea, and those were my needs. And then if you imagine that jetty being covered by a thick, thick fog, and that was my burying of those needs, my not wanting to see them, or validate them, or honor, or dignify them. So, I just didn’t want them to be there, I thought I could get around them. So this fog is there, and you can’t see this stone jetty. But if a boat is coming by, it will crash into that jetty. And that’s what happened in my life so many times. I would get angry because I hadn’t been acknowledging my needs. And then when they weren’t met, I would get angry and I wouldn’t know why. So when we can’t honor our needs or even feel or be aware of our needs, a quiet act of violence is going to be done. There is a suppressing of our spirit. There is a trying to bury a part of us alive. And that’s a kind of unconsciously violent act, and it always … When we bury our needs like that that we don’t even know what they are, there will always be a huge cost, and that cost might be ending up in masochistic relationships. … Or you end up building walls, having walls against intimacy and not knowing why you keep pushing people away or running away from available people or getting avoidant or getting angry.

Why You Take the Route of Burying Your Needs

Those are all the things that happen when we take a territory of our soul or our being, which is our needs, and say no to it and don’t claim it as ours. So many ways in which we flee intimacy are a direct result of not embracing and honoring and dignifying our needs. I talk about this a lot in my book, Deeper Dating. But there’s a practice that we can do to identify when we might be burying our needs. We can look at if we’re getting angry a lot in a relationship, that’s a sign that there’s some really big needs we’re burying, or in our lives if we’re getting angry a lot. We can look at if we are getting numb. If we’re getting numb, that’s a kind of numbing the power of our needs, the intensity of our needs, feeling like life isn’t going to give us what we need so instead of pushing harder to get what we need we’re just going to decrease the force of our need. That leads to depression, that leads to numbness, that leads to disinterest in life. I’m going to take a little detour here and just say something about this. People talk a lot about attachment styles and it’s very clear how anxious attachment styles push love … People with anxious attachment styles push love away by always worrying; worrying are they being loved, is the person going to flee, are they capable of loving, are they going to flee, all of the many kind of worries that come with an anxious attachment style. People with an avoidant attachment style flee intimacy, they don’t run toward it.

The Secured Versus the Anxious

People with a secure attachment style, those folks are kind of a little bit maybe put on a pedestal because those are people who are not constantly afraid, anxious or avoidant in the presence of intimacy, but I want to point something out here. Often people with anxious attachment styles have that because they’re deeply sensitive to nuance in relationship. They feel the ruptures and the tears, the micro-ruptures and the micro-tears and they’re often not making that up, they’re sensing it and existentially it affects them. Often people with anxious attachment styles have a great gift of sensitivity. Often people who have avoidant attachment styles have that because they feel so deeply that they have had to create those kind of unconscious walls. The truth is, that as wonderful as a secure attachment style is, often people with secure attachment styles have made a kind of choice to, to some degree, turn down the volume on their needs and their sensitivities to maintain equilibrium. It’s not that the first two are negative and the secure one is necessarily, in all ways, the better one because each has its own gifts and I think that’s something that’s not spoken about as much as it could be. When we swing out in terms of honoring our needs, if we start asking these questions, “How does this need make sense? How is it connected to my deepest gifts? How is this something that if I honored it, it would create a better life for me and maybe a better world for other people?” So that the first stage is the honoring and the dignifying of our needs.

The Cost of Burying Your Needs

It’s something we’re not taught to do but when we do that it’s like holding our soul and our heart with cupped hands, cradling the essence of who we are. Until we do that, what are we going to do with our needs? We’re going to suppress them, we’re going to bank them, we’re going to avoid them, and that’s going to cost us a great deal. I heard a wonderful saying in a course I took once and it was, “Swing out with the people you love in terms of what you ask for and in terms of what you give. ” I think that’s so true because if we don’t swing out with honoring our needs, even just internally to begin with, we will never know their full nature, their full character, and their full contribution. We’re sitting with someone on a date and we want more closeness, more intimacy, and instead of telling ourselves, “Well, that’s just needy,” instead we say, “This is my capacity for intimacy and it’s one of the most precious parts of my being.” Or we have a need for more truth and more reality in a conversation. Instead of feeling ashamed of that or frightened we honor that and we think, “What’s the truth that I’m sensing that’s not being spoken here? What is everybody in the room pretending not to know that I’m feeling and registering and having a need that there be truth told instead.” This is such an exciting and enlivening process to begin to recognize our buried needs and when we express them … I’ll tell another story here. A dear friend of mine, when I was in my late twenties, found a partner, fell madly and wildly in love.

Another Sad Love Story

It was not a healthy relationship and he kind of disappeared, I felt him go underground in his romantic obsession in this relationship. Also, for me, he was my dearest, dearest friend and I felt like, for me, a relationship was about a million miles away. I lost so much in losing him, which would have happened anyway if he felt that much in love with somebody, but happened particularly so because he disappeared in this quicksand of longing for an unavailable person. Anyway, I was angry and I was passive-aggressive. And I was needy and I was demanding, and I felt mortified by this. I felt like I had no right to feel these things. But I felt them and they kept leaking out. One day I remember, something happened and I just opened up to him and I said, “I just miss you. I just ache for our old connection and I miss you and I want more of you.” I felt really embarrassed saying this. It was the nitty-gritty truth, it was my needs that I stopped burying and acting out around. I said that to him and his response was, “I can hear that I can really hear that. I get it, I love you, and I can hear that.” He said, “But when you get angry at me, when you don’t really share what you’re feeling, when you’re blaming me, when you don’t get to the nitty gritty of what your want is, I feel blamed and I feel defensive.” I thought, “Oh my God.” The most tender part of me, the thing that I was protecting against saying the most, brought us closer together.

A Moment of Reflection

It was a moment when I realized that the vulnerability of my need was actually a glue between us. My shame and embarrassment and defensiveness around that was a shield between us.

This is something you might even want to think about right now. In your relationships, are there any relationships where you’re feeling numb, where you’re feeling distant, where you’re noticing you’re feeling angry a lot? Those are gorgeous signs, those are “X marks the spot signs” to say, “What’s the need here that’s not being met?” How could you, as Harville Hendrix wonderfully says, “Turn your anger into an ask.” Like I did with my friend that time that was such a revelation for me. How can you swing out in terms of what you ask for? When you can honor, when we can honor our needs and see the contribution inherent in them and give them all the space and the dignity they need, then we are able, it’s a non-pressured, non-loaded inner environment and we’ve got space where we can begin to frame things in a way that doesn’t off-put the other person. Sometimes I think that’s like working with dough and getting flour on your hands. You can’t squeeze into the dough because it’s really sticky but if you have flour you can play with it, you can move it around, you can adjust it, and that’s the space we give ourselves when we validate and honor our needs. We have play room, we have movement room to think, “How can I articulate this? I’m not crazy, this is a real feeling, how can I articulate this to the person I care about?” Then we can think about what their needs are as well.

Honoring Your Needs Is Enriching Your Life

When we get to the point that we can honor our needs and frame them in that way, it’s a kind of generosity even though it might not be easy. This is just … If there is a way to enrich our lives, it’s the honoring of our needs, the making space for our needs, and then if there’s a way to enrich our intimacy journey and our relationships it’s to find ways to articulate those needs and to listen to the needs of the people we love. Rich and exciting subject, thank you all for listening and I look forward to seeing you on the next episode of the Deeper Dating Podcast.

Each one of these signs forecasts the fact that real and healthy love is on its way. Love’s arrival may feel like a gift; a stroke of amazing luck. But you can INVITE that luck–and here’s how.

Table of Contents

• Losing Your Taste On Attractions of Deprivation
• The Wonders of Attractions of Inspiration
• Shutting Doors To Acts That Drive Love Away
• The Path That Guarantees Love Is On Its Way

Episode Introduction: Love Is On Its Way

There are four signs that healthy love is moving closer to you and that you are learning the deepest lessons of self-love. Stay tuned to the Deeper Dating Podcast to find out what those four signs are. Hello everybody and welcome to the Deeper Dating Podcast. I’m Ken Page and I’m a psychotherapist and a coach and the author of the bestselling book Deeper Dating. And today I’m going to be talking about four signs that show that healthy love is on the way. This week and every week I’m going to share with you the greatest tools and skills and insights that I know to help you find real, sustainable, beautiful love, and heal your life in the process because the real skills of dating are the skills of love and the skills of love are the greatest skills of all for a happy and rich life. And if you want to learn more about the work that I do, the courses that I teach and this entire approach, just go to deeperdatingpodcasts.com. And there you’ll receive a free gift of an eBook of some of my most important ideas. And you can also get a transcript of this entire episode and all of my other episodes.

Subscribe and Leave Ken A Review

Let me just say as well that everything I share on this podcast is educational in nature. It’s not medical or psychiatric advice or treatment. And if you’re experiencing any serious psychological symptoms, please do seek professional help. And by the way, if you like what you’re learning here, it would be a wonderful gift if you could subscribe and leave me a review. So thank you so much for that. In doing the work that I do, I have found that there are four conditions that when these conditions appear, they really forecast the advent of real and healthy love. So when love arrives, that feels like magic. It feels like a kind of gift of fate and love. But as a talk about in my book, Deeper Dating, we can invite that luck by approaching our dating life in a different way. So if you find that these shifts are happening for you, be really, really encouraged because you’re practicing a path of wisdom and you are well on the way to finding the kind of love that can last.

Losing Your Taste On Attractions of Deprivation

So the first one is that you lose your taste for what I call attractions of deprivation. It’s so easy to get attracted to people who sometimes can commit and other times can’t, or people who treat us wonderfully and then they diminish us or demean us or stop showing up. And these relationships, these almost relationships are really usually highly charged and they’re gnawingly addictive. They’re like a slot machine. They keep us coming back for more. We just long to kind of get it right to finally make the changes we think we need to make, change ourselves, change the situation, change the environment to get our partner to love us. We struggle to fix ourselves and improve ourselves. We struggle to fix them and improve them. We play hard to get and then we get needy. We try giving more or we practice giving less. We try to be funnier and wittier and more successful or more in shape so that the person we’re interested in will finally want us as much as we are wanting them. So I call these attractions of deprivation and we all have a circuitry where that can really turn us on. That can be super, super exciting because the almost triggers are inadequacy feelings are our loneliness that we maybe have felt our whole lives, our sense of need, all those things and the desperation attached to those things get triggered by these relationships. So they feel like love, but really they’re pain.

Concluding a Dead End Era

And at a certain point, and usually because we’ve experienced tremendous pain, we start to lose our taste for these relationships that chip away at our sense of self-worth.

And that’s a really good thing. It is the marker of a deep and important change. One of the four changes that I’m talking about here. It’s when you find you just can’t stomach the thought of being hurt or deprived like that again. And that’s a great thing. And when you become less sticky to these kinds of attractions, a dead end era of your romantic lives is finally coming to an end. And that’s when you can begin the real work of intimacy, which is cultivating your attractions to relationships that truly feed and nurture you. And that’s the greatest wisdom of all for anyone seeking love. So here’s the next sign.

You find that kindness and availability become more important to you.

So what happens is as you lose your taste for attractions of deprivation, people usually experience, and I talk about this in other episodes, a kind of a temporary void in our dating life. We know we don’t want the pain of past relationships, but nothing else maybe seems as exciting or maybe there’s a period of hibernation that comes when we make these changes and we just need peace from the tumult of relationships. So it’s a kind of quiet period that could feel a little odd and strange. Like, all right, I gave up those negative relationships and those negative attractions, but nothing new is coming.

The Birth of Attractions of Inspiration

But in time and sometimes with help after we make that choice to say no to attractions of deprivation, little by little we start to look for and we actually start to notice our attractions of inspiration. And when that happens, it’s a huge and positive sign. So those attractions are based on an essentially consistent quality of shared kindness, generosity, and emotional availability, which is an amazing and wonderful experience. Sometimes these kinds of attractions unfold a little more slowly and they get richer as time goes on and they make us feel love and not that itch of desperation. There’s a sense of peace that goes with them, but that doesn’t mean that these relationships are boring because when we are with someone and there’s a quality of availability and goodness and decency and we’re sexually and romantically attracted to them, that’s pure joy. That is the state that we want. That’s the state of peace. That’s the state when the people around us who love us say, “Oh, finally I feel really good about this person that my loved one is with.” And we can measure the quality of our lives by the relationships of mutual inspiration that we have cultivated. That’s almost, perhaps, the greatest measure of the quality of our lives in all arenas and research backs that up. When we’re younger we get trapped and maybe not so much younger. We get trapped by drama so easily. But when we make this decision and make this shift, what happens is we change, our attractions actually begin to change and we cultivate a taste for the beauty and the goodness of these kinds of relationships. And that means that we are well on the way to the kind of relationship that we dream of.

The Wonders of Attractions of Inspiration

When you’re in an attraction of inspiration, the joy that you feel doesn’t come from a sense of, uh, dramatic, repeated conquest, or a momentary kind of validation. It instead comes from this essential quality of contentment that we feel with our partners. And we don’t feel consistently bigger than our partners, or smaller than our partners. In some very basic way we feel, and I love this expression that they use in 12 step programs. We feel “right sized”, but most of us have never been taught that these kinds of attractions of inspiration have their own trajectory and they need to be cultivated and nourished in different ways than we might be used to. They thrive on honesty and risk and vulnerability and goodness and kindness. And it may seem at times that they’re not as exciting as the drama of the other kind of relationships, but they’re ultimately so much more so because there’s a thrilling risk available in these relationships. And it’s the risk of revealing who we really are. And if we take that risk with our partner and we find that we’re accepted and embraced, the erotic charge, the emotional charge, the romantic charge of the relationship deepens and intensifies. And these are the people who deserve to see the real us; our tender self, our wild self, our kinky self, our unshared ideas, our creativity, and the depths of who we are. And by the way, that is why attractions of inspiration in some strange way are the scariest relationships of all because we know we’re truly at risk with someone like that.

The Role of Fear

So our fear does lots of different things to save us from the risk of true vulnerability inherent in these relationships. And the best strategy, which kept me single for decades, is tricking us into fleeing by saying back to the hunt. Next, there’s got to be someone better out there, someone hotter or someone, whatever-er, or someone more exciting. But if we don’t flee, we may find that that fear passes, I call that the wave of distance. And when the fear passes, and it does, it always really does pass. If you don’t try to suffocate yourself and go further than you want to go or flee all the way. The fear passes, that wave of disinterest passes and a clarity comes about who this person could be to you. So if you find that at this point in your journey, you are truly and consciously with primacy seeking these relationships and ignoring or saying no to the thrill or the stickiness or the addictiveness of your attractions of deprivation – celebrate. Because you really, really are on the path to the kind of love that you’re looking for. Okay. So the third one is that you become willing to give up what I call your flight patterns. And I say this all the time, everyone has fear of intimacy. If you’re breathing, you’ve got fear of intimacy. All of us, single or coupled in a great relationship or a not so great relationship, flee the heat and the risks of true intimacy. Everyone does that. Any single person who wants to find love, as well as of course anybody in a relationship who wants to deepen their love, would do so well to become a student of their own flight patterns.

Different Ways To Flee Intimacy

There’s so many different ways to flee intimacy even as we’re seeking intimacy and it’s an act of wisdom and empowerment to recognize how we consciously, unconsciously, semi-consciously flee intimacy. Like staying home and watching TV every night, or endlessly, endlessly looking for love online but not really taking action to stick with the quality people and develop something. Or just being online all the time anyway, not going to places where people with shared values can be found and folks, that is a powerful way to meet people and I know it’s hard. I know it’s difficult, but getting out there and finding events, meetups, gatherings, even if you do this online and find communities online, although in person is so much better, with people who share your values. Or wasting time on your attractions of deprivation. Or not showing your real feelings, playing it cool. Looking for hookups instead of dates, looking for hookups and dates, whichever comes along, drinking too much on our dates. All these different ways – getting angry, getting frustrated, shutting people out, going into seclusion and dropping the ball. These are human things and we all do them. What’s greatness is recognizing that we’re doing them and saying, we’re going to make a change. And this is something I have found and I talk about this a lot. If you want to get a really big bang for your buck in your journey to transform the way you’re looking for love, hit this one folks – notice your flight patterns and consciously change them. You will get such a big bang for your buck.

Shutting Doors To Acts That Drive Love Away

When you start shutting the doors to those actions that kind of indirectly keep love away, when you make that conscious decision, new doors will open. It’s kind of the way the world is made and it’s an amazing, amazing thing. But yeah, it’s an act of bravery to do that. And there’s a certain point when we feel like, okay, I really mean it now that I want healthy love. I realize time is ticking and I’m getting tired of living and sleeping alone. Little note here, this is not true for everybody. Some people are super happy living solo and some people are super happy being in a relationship but not living with or sleeping with the person. So I want to make room for that as well. But so when we’re willing to let go of our flight patterns and when we find ways to meet people who share our values and when we only have second or third dates with people who hold the promise of becoming attractions of inspiration, then things really change. So here’s another, leading with your authentic self. So leading with who you really are may seem on the surface like an easy thing, but it is not. Because we get the most wounded around the places we care the most, around the places where we’re the most real. And those are the parts of us that I call our core gifts. And because those places of our deep authenticity are so vulnerable and because most of us have incurred multiple profound wounds around those core gifts, we tend to either suppress them or create a kind of airbrushed version of ourselves for the world to see.

Treasuring the Gift of Authenticity

But those versions of ourself lack the vigor and the soul and the magnetism of our authenticity. So we find that we’re less successful in attracting the very kind of people who would accept and treasure us for who we are.

So this is something that I have really found to be true. The key is not simply in accepting our authenticity in all its humanity. The key is in treasuring that, naming it as a gift in all of its imperfection, timidity or excess. We have the right to honor our core gifts and to only choose people who do the same.

And when we do that in a non-defensive way, our world begins to change. And that’s when we somehow find ourselves dating people who accept us for who we are, people who are kind and generous of spirit and available. And I can’t explain why this happens, but when we take the steps I described, I’ve seen this occur so many times that I accept it as a real truth. As we do that we find ourselves meeting and being attracted to the kind of people who we could really build a happy life with. But instead of helping us embrace these core gifts, the singles world teaches us how to dishonor them in ourselves and in the people we date. It’s like those ugly fun house mirrors, the prevailing singles culture flashes these distorted, haunting images of who we are supposed to be, how we’re supposed to look. How we’re supposed to act. And they’re really images of what our own flaws and inadequacies feel like to us, as well as the inadequacies of the people we date.

A Culture of Unkindness

Because we are holding them to some kind of strange cultural standard that has an ugliness in its desire for impermeable confidence, perfect glutes, perfect abs, et cetera, et cetera. There’s an inhumanity to that. That is devastating and that’s part of the culture of unkindness that really does tend to exist in the dating world. And the solution to find our self-esteem doesn’t lie within the hall of mirrors of those fun house mirrors that distort who we’re supposed to be, and who other people are supposed to do. The solution does not lie in that horrible hall of fun house mirrors that tells us what’s wrong with us, what’s wrong with other people. What we need to fix about ourselves, how we have to act more confident, how we have to play it cool, how we have to be this thing that is other than who we are. And then to add a little more craziness, but we have to be authentic and natural at the same time. The solution is not to find our self-esteem in that land of fun house mirrors. The solution is to get out of that place and to find a better path.

The Path That Guarantees Love Is On Its Way

And these four things that I speak about are a better and wiser path. And as you take them on, you will feel better about yourself. You will feel more peaceful about yourself and almost miraculously, you really will find yourself meeting people and having mutual attraction with people who treasure you for who you are. So thank you for listening and I look forward to seeing you on the next episode of the Deeper Dating Podcast. And once again, if you like what you’re hearing here, it would be a tremendous gift if you could subscribe and leave me a review. See you next week. Thank you.

When it comes to personal change, intelligence and willpower are some of the weakest tools in our toolbox. Connectedness and caring support, on the other hand, give us access to an inner genius which our best thinking can’t begin to touch. In this episode, you’ll learn how to tap into the brilliance that comes from caring support and connection.

Table of Contents

• Doing Things Differently
• Holding with Cupped Hands
• An Inspiring Kind of Support
• Fueling One’s Courage Through the Power of A Caring Support

Episode Introduction: Caring Support

We think that our superpower is our smartness. We think that our superpower is our willpower, but really our superpower is connectedness and support. In this episode, you’ll learn some powerful ways to accomplish more than you imagined, grow more than you imagined and experience more happiness than you imagined through the power of inner and outer support. So stay tuned to the Deeper Dating podcast. Hello everybody and welcome to the Deeper Dating podcast. I’m Ken Page and I’m a psychotherapist and a coach and the author of the best selling book, Deeper Dating. Today I’m going to be talking about the power of support for you in your intimacy journey and your search for love. This week and every week I’m going to share with you the greatest tools and insights that I know to help you find love and keep it flourishing and heal your life in the process because the skills of dating are nothing more than the skills of relating, and the skills of relationships are the greatest skills of all for a happy life. So if you want to learn more about this approach that I’m going to be teaching today and what I speak about in my podcasts, just go to DeeperDatingpodcast.com and there you’ll receive a transcript of every single episode.

Subscribe and Leave Ken A Review

If you like, you can also sign up for my mailing list to learn more about my upcoming intensive, my courses, the other classes that I teach, and also the work of other people whose approach I really respect. I also just want to say that everything I share in this podcast is educational in nature and it’s not medical or psychiatric advice or treatment. If you’re feeling any serious psychological conditions, I really encourage you to get professional help. You deserve it and it’s so important that you do. Finally, if you like what you’re hearing here, I would love it if you could subscribe on Apple Podcast or elsewhere and leave me a review. That is just such a great gift that you can give as a thank you for what you hear here and what you learn here. So we’re going to jump in now and talk about the power of support. When I used to lead retreats, which I used to do a lot before I became a dad, I would always tell people that at some points in their retreat they were going to experience some difficult times, most likely. And that when they did, my advice to them was of course they would try to deal with it on their own first. Try to get themselves to feel better or see it differently or find a solution, but what I would say to them is if you try that once and it doesn’t work, and if you try it again and it doesn’t work, give up and do something different.

Doing Things Differently

What that something different is, is speak to someone who has wisdom and cares about you. Because you will find healing, resilience, a sense of solution, a sense of capacity around this issue, which is going to be so much more profound than what you ever could have figured out by just working it out in your head – in most cases. Because our mind becomes a closed entity. Somehow, when we’re stuck in our own thinking around a difficult subject, our responses are patterned. They’re fear-based and usually, on some level, they’re defensive. They spring from a place of loneliness, fear, a kind of desperation. Then we make reactive choices that are kind of our immature ways to best handle a situation, but they’re not going to be the most beautiful ways. When we talk to someone we love or care about who gives us space, we’ll feel that space. We will actually feel the kind of physiological feeling of relief or space, compassion for ourselves. When we’re in that space, new thoughts and new ideas come up. Because most of us don’t know how to be as kind to ourselves as someone who loves us will be able to be. Someone I know says,

“If you think you’re going crazy, bring someone along and you’ll never get there.”

I love that. I love that quote. It’s so funny how there’s this feeling, this kind of urgent feeling like I have to figure this out myself. It’s such a common thing to feel that, kind of, we’re lacking somehow if we can’t do that. Or instead to think, well yeah I’m smart, I’m capable. I am able to handle things. Of course I can think of a solution, so I was going to think of a solution.

The Limits of Doing-It-Yourself

When it comes to stuck areas, we become stuck. We become sticky, we become adhesive, and we lose a kind of inner quality of mobility. We stop being porous to the winds of inspiration and inspiration bounces off of us. Why? Because somehow we are not as much in touch with our humanity when we’re scrambling for answers and when we talk to someone we care about, we are soothed, we’re calmed, we’re not scrambling for answers quite in the same way. Or we feel hurt in a relationship with someone and we tell ourselves or maybe not hurt, maybe we have a need that we feel like is not being fulfilled. We tell ourselves, I should get over this. I should work this out myself. I should have the perfect solution that I’m going to speak to this person in such a way that it’s just going to take care of the situation. Again, often it’s I can just get over this, I can work this out myself. That rarely works, if ever, as well as we imagine or hope that it would work. When we go to the place where we kind of follow the rules of feedback which are “saying what you mean, but not saying it mean”. Speaking in “I” statements, not generalizing, not blaming, speaking from the heart, turning our anger into asks. When we speak that way something happens between us and the person we’re talking to often. And often it takes a lot of conversations for this to finally get there and gel and congeal and happen, but something happens and what that something is that a new space is created. In the connection between you and the other person, in their compassion for you, and your compassion for them.

The State of Nakedness

Both parties maybe realize, I was hurting the other person. Or the other person has a need that’s not being met that I could be a part of healing. Or whatever it is the experience is, we think we need to figure it out on our own, but in that state of kind of nakedness, of vulnerability with someone who is essentially safe. There’s something that happens when we’re kind of at stake at those moments and there’s something beautiful about being at stake like that. And the other person sees it and feels it and it shifts things in a very powerful way. Something else is the experience of holding pain and I was speaking to a monastic in Thich Nhat Hanh‘s order. Thich Nhat Hanh is one of my great heroes. He is a Vietnamese monk who was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by Martin Luther King and his work is very connected to activism, to the daily moments of our lives, bringing compassion to our lives. He’s just one of the greatest teachers that I know. I was speaking to one of his monastics and we were talking about dating and she was remembering when she used to date. I asked her, in retrospect, would you have done something differently during the time that you were dating? She said, yeah. She said, in retrospect she said,

“My loneliness hurt so much. It felt so bitter inside of me that I really kind of had to bottle that down. It made me hard. The coldness, the nastiness, and the loneliness of my search for love, it had such a bitter taste to it that I had to just shut down.”

Holding with Cupped Hands

“I realize now that it was more suffering than I could hold alone. But if I shared it with people I loved and felt that we were all kind of holding it with cupped hands together.” And I’ll say more about cupped hands in a minute. But she said, “if I would have allowed that, the bitterness and the intensity of that pain would have dissipated. My heart would have softened. In that, I would have maybe been a better dater or have been able to search for love in a better way.” This is really, really true and the research shows this in so many ways. Even in a physiological way that when you hold the hands of someone you trust and care about, you experience less physical pain. Your blood pressure goes down. There is something that happens in connectedness and that connectedness, it’s almost like there’s a space of self-sufficiency which is essentially self-sabotaging. It’s limited, it’s like an ingrown toenail of the psyche. It turns in on itself and that is what we tend to do when we are not connected enough and the experience of nature can connect us. The experience of being with someone we love can connect us and when we’re with someone we love and there’s hurt or there’s wounding and it’s a safe person, our sharing our hurt stops that kind of deep bitterness and kind of melts it when we can do this with the other person and feel heard and listened to. They say that the process of relationships is a process of rupture and repair, a rupture of trust, a rupture of safety, a rupture of incredibly right connectedness.

The Healing Power of Connection

And then the repair of being able to heal that by being able to understand what’s going on for the other person, feeling that the other person understands what goes on for us. Often we don’t need the other person to get it completely right. We just need them to hear it and care, and that is so often enough. So we keep living in a world where the construct is that we are going to make ourselves feel better. But sometimes the way to make ourselves feel better is just to put our arm around the person who’s next to us who we love, or take their hand, or express what’s in our heart. In fact, the truth is that often the move toward independence toward figuring things out on our own is a fear of reaching out. It’s a fear of closeness. It’s a fear of nakedness. It’s a fear of connecting. I’ve spoken a number of times about the book Change or Die by Alan Deutschman. In this book, Alan Deutschman looked at a number of people who had had a coronary event, some kind of serious coronary health event. And they were told in no uncertain terms by their doctors that they would not live if they didn’t change their dietary habits. Sure enough, of course just about everybody said, well I’m going to change my dietary habits because there’s not even a choice in the matter. I don’t want to die. I want to live. So, of course, I’m going to do whatever it takes. What he found is that over a period of time, almost everybody could not hold on to a healthy diet even knowing the repercussions of that.

There’s Strength in Numbers

So what he did was he studied this small percentage of people who actually were able to maintain dietary change and take care of themselves in that way. He assessed what were the attributes of these people? What was the support these people had? What were the attributes that they had? How did they do it when almost nobody else could? So what he found was that they had a paradigm that they could work with, that they believed in around changing their diet, and they could follow that paradigm. The main thing he discovered was that they could fail and they could re-frame things around those failures and do it in the presence of support of other people. Those were the people who were able to, in the broadest sense, maintain those changes. This is so true for us. We keep thinking that we can do it alone. I know for me, in my experience with people who have addictions, again and again, you see them thinking that they can figure their way through it, but in fact, the research shows this and we discover over time that support is the way that people actually change serious and self-destructive patterns. Our loved ones, the people we care about, the people who know us can help us rewire. I remember at one point, this was actually early in my relationship with my husband and I was hitting a stuck point. It was my own stuff. There was a lot of fears that I had about the relationship and I was very concerned and I didn’t know what to do. I remember talking to a friend of mine and all he said to me was, “Ken I know you so well.

An Inspiring Kind of Support

And knowing you so well for so many years I could see kind of how hard this is for you or the pain that you’re in.” I could sense from what he saying was that this was kind of a pain of my own making, but that he had a lot of compassion for it. That was all he had to say. Something shifted in me that allowed space for this issue and the space that was allowed was enough for me to be able to continue. The space that created in me let me somehow relax, and these fears that I had about things working out with Greg just somehow eased and relaxed. That was enough for me to be able to go on and just stop worrying about something that moments ago I was so deeply worried about. I have a preoccupied attachment style and we’ll talk more about attachment styles in a later podcast, but so for me, preoccupation worry is a very home base kind of experience. I want to talk about another kind of support that we can gain. It’s a support of being connected to a sense of inspiration. So if you think about this, if you think about a time that maybe you’ve had a difficulty in a relationship and you came to a conclusion, you got an answer that kind of really made sense to you. Let’s say that we’re talking about a situation where your answer and your response brought you closer to the person. We’re not going to look at a situation for this where the answer and response you got necessarily helped you leave the other person.

Moments of Insight

For this one, this insight helped you become closer to this person, maybe set more boundaries, but whatever the reason enabled you to feel closer to this person. If you remember that moment of insight, “Oh I can share this with this person, or this is why maybe they did it, or this is what I could say to them or this is what I need.” Whatever the insight was that felt like an “aha” for you that was able to help the relationship. If you think back on that feeling of insight, it’s almost like you’re not alone in those moments of insight.

I’m not necessarily saying that there’s a presence, but I’m saying that there’s a feeling of warmth and there’s a feeling of not-aloneness in those moments when we have insights that are kind of compassion based. There’s a feeling of not-aloneness and that feeling is a very deeply healing feeling.

What I teach people in my classes, in my courses, in my intensive, is that the experience of holding whatever it is we’re experiencing with cupped hands in itself heals us. This is something I’ve talked about in the podcast too, but if you now picture, you could even do it right now. You just take your hand and you open it up flat and you imagine kind of you’re holding your feelings there. Well, it’s kind of flat and it’s cold. Or then if you imagine taking whatever it is you’re feeling at the moment and holding it with squeezed hands like you could squeeze your hand and feel what that feels like.

Clasping Hands versus Cupping Hands

Now if you take your two hands and create a cupping shape so that there’s space, there’s no compression, there’s not suffocation, but there’s a cradling and what that cupping feeling is like. When we can cup our feelings like that, whatever they are, there somehow is a sense where that bitter aloneness dissipates. It’s a rich, rich subject to think about why that is, but I think it’s true. I think the minute we have moments of compassion like that, somehow we feel less disconnected from the world. Our experiences have a less cold and scary and distant world. That act of compassion is an act of support, but it’s one that springs from inside as well as a sense of connection to the heart of our humanity, but also to the heart of the world. There’s a process I teach called the Inner Mentor process, which I also speak a lot about in this podcast which is a very powerful way to obtain support and in this case without even talking to somebody in a physical way. What you do is you picture the you that you’re meant to be and you kind of embody, you feel that you, you picture that you. Kind of a further advanced more evolved you. A you living fully, as you. Fully and richly as you, as the you you’re meant to be. You picture that you, and then you imagine jumping into that flow and you look at yourself, the you of right now experiencing whatever problem it is. You’re looking at the you of today from this place of the you that you’re meant to be. You’re in this gorgeous state of flow.

Fueling One’s Courage Through the Power of A Caring Support

You think, what instructions do I want to call out from this beautiful place to the me who’s struggling right now and guaranteed the thoughts that come out will bypass critical judgment. They will have beauty and they will have depth. Often as a psychotherapist, I work with clients and I’ll have an idea that I think is really good and I’ll ask my clients to do the inner mentor process and they do it and almost invariably what they come up with is going to be richer and more beautiful and more simple than whatever it is that I come up with. This is something I’ve spoken about before. I want to talk about one last aspect. Last aspect of the power of support and that is that when we’re scared to do something, when we don’t feel worthy of doing something, when someone has a bigger picture for us of who we’re meant to be, they’re telling us that and supporting us and nudging us and even our using them as a marking post like, “Okay, I’m going to go do it. I’m going to go do it right now and then I’ll call you when I’m done,” and be able to use them to kind of jump into the scary next. That ability to feel supported in that way is a very, very powerful thing and truly, truly, truly when you feel like you have voices, voices of people who care about you, and the message that they’re saying inside somehow is, “I want this for you, of course you can do it. You can make this happen. Go for it.”

When you have those voices just internalized in your head, you will do more amazing things.

The Journey to A Place of Connectedness

You will come closer to your greatness. You will do more scary things, and you will take new risks and you will move closer to a bigger, broader, wider life. So these are just some of the reasons why it’s so important to get out of the framework of, in our limited mind, we are just going to figure this out and pull ourselves up by our bootstraps and moving into this richer place. The power of moving into this richer place, which is a place of connectedness. From that place of connectedness, addressing whatever the issue or the problem or the concern is that we’re having at that time. This eases our journey in the most profound ways. What’s amazing is how quickly we forget to do that. So this is a message for all of us that what we want to be able to do is to not feel alone with our struggles, to not feel alone with our lives, to not feel alone with our journey. What I talked about in this podcast are some different ways that we can not feel alone, but feel the warmth of that connectedness which changes the quality of our life for the better. Well, thank you so much for listening and if you like what you heard, I really encourage you to subscribe, to leave me a review, and to go to DeeperDatingpodcasts.com to learn more about the work that I do, my upcoming classes, and the work of other people that I deeply respect. So thanks again and I look forward to seeing you on the next episode of the Deeper Dating podcast.

We’ve all been “need-shamed” in our culture. But our needs hold the key to the deepest possibility of real connection, and until we learn to value them, we’ll put up roadblocks to love. In this episode, you’ll learn about honoring, liberating and expressing your needs–and the huge difference that it will make in your life.

Table of Contents

• Getting To The Other Side of Fear
• The Terrain Outside The Safety Gate
• Suppressing Versus Expressing Your Needs
• Recognizing and Honoring Your Needs
• The Art of Expressing Your Needs

Episode Introduction: Expressing Your Needs

What about all those moments where there’s something you want to say, something you want to share, something you want to ask for, and it’s just too hard, and it’s just too scary. Stay tuned to the Deeper Dating Podcast and we’re going to explore the power and importance of those moments and what to do when you’re in that situation. Hello everybody and welcome to The Deeper Dating Podcast. I’m Ken Page and I’m a psychotherapist and a coach and today, I am going to talk about the liberating and terrifying experience of being who you really are. This week and every week, I’m going to share the greatest tools I know to help you find love and keep it flourishing and heal your life in that process because the skills of dating are nothing more than the skills of love and we know that the skills of love are the greatest skills there are. If you want to learn more about this approach and how it can speed an easier path to love, and if you’d like to hear a transcript of this episode, you can learn lots more by going to deeperdatingpodcast.com. And if you join my mailing list, you will get a free gift of an ebook as well.

Subscribe and Leave Ken A Review

I also want to say that everything I share in this podcast is educational in nature. It is not medical or psychiatric advice or treatment. And if you’re experiencing serious psychological conditions, please seek professional help. Also, if you like what you’re learning here, like what you’re hearing here, please subscribe and leave me a review. That is a wonderful, wonderful thing, so thank you for that. So let’s jump in. What I want to talk about is something that is kind of so radical and essential and important and something that has been a process that has changed my life, and as a psychotherapist and a coach, it’s kind of one of the essence things that I see again and again for people who are really doing their intimacy work. What I want to talk about is what happens when we show who we are and we show who we are in a generative way, and what happens when we don’t do that? And both of those points are really, really important for anyone who wants to cultivate self-love, a feeling of a place in this world, and romantic and sexual love. So, how many times have we experienced… how many times have you experienced this?

Getting To The Other Side of Fear

I know I’ve experienced it a lot. Being in an environment and having a feeling, a want, a need, a perspective, and being scared to share it for whatever the reason you being authentic at that moment feels like a risk. I mean, that’s a human, human, common experience and that is these kind of… these experiences in our lives or these kinds of micro coming outs that are like mini-initiation rites. And an initiation rite is when you’re confronted with a challenge that you don’t know if you could do, but then if you do it, and you get to the other side, you’re more you and you’re able to be more you in the world and our life is filled with these moments and in sex, in love, in our creative pursuits. I know an author who has this great line, he says,

“If you’re not writing to a firing squad, you’re not writing at all.”

And I love that because there’s a firing squad. Sometimes it’s outside, often, it’s inside and we feel it when we step out of the bounds of who we think we’re supposed to be into the terrain of who we really are. So imagine that there is a space, we can think of this spatially.

There’s the safe zone where you know you can express yourself and it will be accepted, it will be comfortable, it will be fine, it’s not going to cause problems.

The Terrain Outside The Safety Gate

And then there’s the outskirts land where you’re stepping into a state of greater vulnerability which is scary. Greater originality, which is scary because we’re kind of herd animals in a way and when we step out of originality, we fear that we might be left alone, or anytime that we’re stepping into a zone that feels true to us, but we know that isn’t going to be easily accepted. That’s the terrain that’s outside the safety gate, but here’s the thing, all of that terrain that is authentically us, that’s outside the safety gate. If that terrain is not inhabited by us, now that doesn’t mean that you have to express it because it might not be safe to express it, but what it means is you honor it and you value it. These are my feelings, these are my perspectives. They may be really different, but they are me. They are me. That’s owning and occupying that space and from there, we can pivot, we can turn. We have a core that we can move out of and decide in a healthy way. Do I want to share this? Do I not want to share this? Is this safe to share? Is it not safe to share? That’s when we can occupy that zone of the scary parts of us, the shadow parts of us, the different parts of us, the unique parts of us, the parts with deep needs and deep passions. And that stuff is holy stuff and it’s hugely important and it’s really powerful.

The Tender Parts of Ourselves

And when we can inhabit that and be able to make that choice and we choose to share those parts of ourselves, which are best shared in a safe relationship with a safe person, sometimes we need to share them in an unsafe relationship, in an unsafe situation, but we need to do it because we need to stand up for ourselves. And if we can do that consciously knowing that it’s hard and scary and that there are risks, that’s fine, but when it comes to parts of ourselves that feel really tender and you can think about this, you can think,

“What are the parts of me that in a relationship are tender for me to share?”

And I think they’re kind of different for all of us. They’re like fingerprints, they’re universal in one way, but they’re really also different for each one of us. So what are those parts? I know for me when I share very effusive feelings, there’s a lot of shame because of past history. Those are really vulnerable for me. Effusive feelings and I have a lot of effusive feelings. Places of hurt and tenderness, places of need, those are some of mine that I’ve had to do a lot of work on being able to claim and occupy that territory.

The Byproducts of Disintegration

Now, when we claim and occupy that territory inside ourselves and we’re with a safe person and we share it in a generative way, which is as they say, “say what you mean, mean what you say, but don’t say it mean”. Or the beautiful words Harville Hendrix says, “Turn your anger into an ask.” Or whatever it is that’s on the edge for you and you share it in a generative way with someone who is safe and it is met and heard, it’s just the best feeling. You feel like there’s a place for you on this planet and you feel like one of the places for you on this planet that feels like home is with this person and that’s glorious. And when it’s somebody we’re sexually attracted to, there’s a blossoming of sexual desire that comes out of that. There’s a joy, there’s a sense of romance, there’s a sense of rightness or at homeness. It’s a fabulous, wonderful feeling where romance is healthy. Where romance is not based on feeling deprived and trying to get the person to meet your needs, but actually feeling seen and connected. Sometimes, however, we don’t occupy that space and we’re in a relationship with someone and we are afraid to claim that part of ourselves. We’re afraid to hold it inside ourselves and say, “Yeah, these are my wants at this moment. These are my needs. They’re good, they’re fine, they’re great. They’re acceptable.” When we can’t do that, when we feel ashamed, a bunch of different things are going to happen which are called kind of the byproducts of disintegration because we’re not integrated. We are not okay with who we are.

Suppressing Versus Expressing Your Needs

One thing that happens is if we suppress those needs, there’s going to be a feeling of shame that goes with that and there’s going to be a burying of energy. And that is a kind of act of quiet violence against our being. So you’re with somebody on a date, you like this person and there’s something you want to share and something you want to say and you don’t say it because it just feels a little bit scary or you’re not ready to or you feel a little ashamed or really a little embarrassed by it. So what’s going to happen is you just created a mini implosion. I mean, we do it all the time and it’s just part of existence. But when we do that, when we bury something we want to say or feel and not for good reasons, like this other person is going through something difficult and we don’t want to dump this on them, but out of shame. When that happens, it’s an act of quiet violence against our being, and all of a sudden, the space that should be filled with an acceptance of ourselves is now space that can be taken over by other people. Because we haven’t claimed it and we haven’t owned it, and when that happens, we are likely to end up in masochistic situations.

When shame stops us from owning and expressing who we are, there is a pocket where pain is usually going to enter. For one thing, even though we haven’t tried it with the person, our insides will think, “This person just rejected these parts of me.”

Toxic Dating Advice

It’s not rational, but it’s what we will feel when we reject those parts of ourselves. So that’s what happens. Those are some of the things that happen when we suppress those impulses to be authentic. To express maybe the words “I love you” that we’re afraid to say, or maybe, “Let’s have sex.” Or maybe, “I just am feeling really vulnerable and I’d love to be held,” or, “I’d rather look… I’d like to look into your eyes now. Let’s hold hands. Let’s look into each other’s eyes.” Or, “Let’s go have an adventure. I’m really in the mood for an adventure and for some fun.” Or, “Could you touch me a little more gently?” Or, “It’s okay, you could be rough.” The myriad of things that we get shy about and tender about. When we can claim those and speak them and they’re met, that’s joy. That’s joy. That’s fabulous. It builds the bond, it builds Eros, it builds the connection. When we are ashamed of those parts of ourselves and hence we suppress them, we will assume that the other person has rejected us. Also, we’ll move into a state where we’re just like, “I say it’s like climbing a wobbly ladder. We’re not going to feel solid inside because somehow, we’re not okay anymore.” And I think you could take a minute and remember both of those feelings and experiences in your life. I’m going to share a story about this that I really love. I have a friend and she was dating and dating and not meeting anybody for a lot of years and she really wanted to have a kid.

The Reward of Expressing Your Needs

Now, this was at the time of the book, The Rules, when women who read that book and she had read it and been really affected by it were told, “Don’t ask for too much, don’t put out your needs too much, don’t act too excited, don’t act too enthusiastic.” And there are new variations of that that are being shared all the time in dating advice and they’re toxic.

Why are they toxic? Because they’re telling you you should kind of be a little bit ashamed of those parts of you.

Anyway, so she really liked this guy and she had been dating him and she’d had had a lot of disappointing experiences. The truth was she was very clear that she wanted to get married and have kids and yet she knew… Obviously, you don’t go around saying that too early because you’re going to scare somebody off. But so she met this guy, she really liked him and he really liked her and they were like their third or fourth date and she just said, “The hell with it. I can’t do this anymore.” So she looked at him and she said, “So before we go any further, there’s just something I have to tell you because if this is not right for you, that’s fine, but we’re probably not going to be a match.”

Recognizing and Honoring Your Needs

And she said, “I really want to get married and I really want to have kids.” And he looked at her and he said, “Where do I sign up?” And they’re together so many … They’re together now decades later, but that act of bravery where she said, “Screw the rules, this is who I am.” She occupied her truth and then from that place made this scary decision to share what she wanted to share and the results were wonderful. She was met and it was a joyful and really great thing. Now, another thing that can happen when we suppress our needs, when we don’t occupy that space, is it’s kind of like pushing a beach ball underneath the water. Sooner or later, it’s going to pop up and when it does, it’s going to pop up in a way that we might end up feeling embarrassed about because “need suppressed turns into neediness, need shamed turns into neediness.” It doesn’t go away and until it’s honored, we can’t make decisions about what to do. So take a minute to think about this, to think about romantic relationships, any relationships, what it would be like the next time you have a need and we are need shamed in this culture, need shamed again and again and again. So this is a claiming the value and the preciousness of our needs. So the next time, like you just picture being in a relationship with someone and feeling a kind of upswell of a need. A need to be held, a need to be touched, a need to talk about something important, a need to be reassured.

The Healing that Comes from Expressing Your Needs

A need to have a mutual “I love you” happen and just think about that for a moment. Think about the times that you have that and now, we’re realizing that the first step is to occupy that need and to honor it. Not just accept it like, “Oh, I’m human. I have needs that are kind of weird.” But to honor it. To honor it as a real thing. Then we can decide how to move with it. Now, the other thing that can happen is that when we have a need and it feels authentic and real, but we’ve been shamed for it, we might have a different kind of impulse and that impulse is to prove that we have a right to have this need. That’s another kind of off-balance that’s so human and so understandable, but that’s when we could get strident. That’s when we can get repetitive, that’s when we can have arguments that go on in our head with inner voices telling us again and again why our needs aren’t justified. When you find that happening for you, that means that there is a way that you are not starting out with a basic honoring of that need and until we do that, nothing’s going to work, and this is where wiser dating actually heals our attachment issues because when you date and you think, you take your needs and you’re holding them, just hoping and praying that the other person won’t shame them or will let … That somehow, this part of you can be seen and expressed, but there’s a sense of fear around that and maybe a sense of shame or ambivalence about your needs.

Honoring Exuberance

That’s when you are more likely to be hurt. When you in your dating life actually say, “These are my needs. These are my perspectives, this is who I am. I’m going to honor that. I’m going to treasure that.” When you do that, there is a healing that happens inside that actually shifts the kind of people you’re going to be attracted to. Shame your needs. You will be attracted to people who can’t meet your needs. Honor your needs. Your attractions will shift and your attractiveness will shift. Just like an atom that has a certain amount of extra negative energy or positive energy needs its opposite. When you don’t honor whatever these parts of you are that we’re talking about that feel tender, that feel vulnerable, that you really want to express and live, but it’s scary and it’s hard. When they’re honored inside, you’re attractiveness changes, your attractions change, and there is a central kind of self-love that happens that changes everything. So think about this for a moment. When you’re on a date, imagine being with someone, maybe you’re dating someone now and you can ask yourself, and you can ask yourself this in every relationship because really, really, really in just about every single relationship, there is territory that’s authentically us that we’re a little ashamed of occupying. Here’s an example for me, it’s a quality of exuberance. So I’m with my husband and my son, our daughters, and I am feeling this bubbling sense of kind of crazy exuberance because that’s like a way that I am, but I’ve been shamed for that.

The Art of Expressing Your Needs

So I don’t show the exuberance, that means I get a little flat, that means they notice that I’m not all the way there. There’s a sadness in me, but a safety. I’m practicing showing my exuberance so I might… I tickle people, I bother them, I annoy them, I tease them, I hug them, I grab them, I act silly. These are just things that I do and I don’t do it when it’s an imposition on their being too often, but these are ways or I say I love you or I just expressed my joy at who they are. If I don’t do that, there’s a price to pay because all of that energy will go subterranean and turn against me. Now, if I feel that, and it’s not the right time and space, but I’m honoring my exuberance, then I can hold it and I’ll be kind of happy and content and not necessarily act it out. If instead I feel a lifelong shame around this crazy quality in me, I will deflate my being. I’ll just feel deflated and that’s going to create some kind of cycle of insecurity that happens for me and that is what happens. It’s like the conservation of energy. Every portion of your most authentic self that isn’t honored goes in a direction that ends up hurting us, moving us to sadness, moving us to self-sabotage, moving us to anger. All of those parts of ourselves that are honored are really are genius. They’re our uniqueness. Honoring those parts is the act that every artist has to do when they’re looking at their art and facing the firing squad and then saying, “Yes, I am going to express this.”

The Act That Changes Everything

We live as artists in our relationship and this is just a rich and beautiful and ongoing question of, “What am I not expressing right now?” It’s concrete, you can ask yourself that question and you’ll almost always get interesting answers and if you can then in response, start by honoring those parts of yourself. And then in safe environments, being able to actually share them, well, our life blossoms into a state of deeper passion, deeper wildness, deeper joy, deeper peace, deeper us. And that’s the intimacy journey and we can live it even when we’re dating as we get to know people, and especially if we experience them as safe. We can begin to reveal these ultra human parts of ourselves and when they respond in a positive way Eros deepens, the relationship deepens, the connection deepens. So, a wonderful thought. The thought of honoring the parts of ourselves that we’ve maybe been afraid to honor, and that act of honoring changes everything. So, thank you for listening to this episode. Please do subscribe and leave a review if you’re interested in what I’m speaking about and I will see you in the next episode of The Deeper Dating Podcast.

This episode will quite likely stir you in wonderful ways. It will teach you the path to gratification and away from emptiness. And you’ll learn what your deep-down self has been trying to tell you about love and intimacy, probably for a really long time. Get ready to learn some big things about yourself and affirming gift.

Table of Contents

• The Sense of Deep Inner Comfort
• Virtuous Cycle of Self-Love
• What Are the Daily Life Joys That Mean the Most to You?
• What Are Some of the Persistent Longings You Have?

Episode Introduction: Affirming Gift

Here’s a practice that’s one of the most self-affirming things that you can do for yourself in your search for love. And it’s comprised of two questions that will stir you in the deepest ways. Stay tuned to The Deeper Dating Podcast to learn more. Hello everybody, I’m Ken Page and welcome to the Deeper Dating Podcast. I’m a psychotherapist and a coach and the author of the best-selling book Deeper Dating. And today, I’m going to be talking about what may be the most self-affirming gift that we can give ourselves in our search for love. This week and every week, I’m going to share with you the greatest tools I know to help you find love and keep it flourishing and heal your life in the process because the skills of dating are nothing more than the skills of love and the skills of love are the greatest skills of all for a happy life and if you want to know more about the deeper dating approach, if you want to hear about my upcoming classes and intensives or if you want a transcript of this episode, just go to deeperdatingpodcast.com and if you sign up for my mailing list, you’ll also get a free eBook of the four greatest insights that I know to help people transform their search for love.

Subscribe and Leave Ken A Review

I also want to say that everything I’m going to share in this podcast is educational in nature. It’s not medical or psychiatric advice and if you’re experiencing any serious psychological conditions, please get help. And finally, if you like what you’re learning here, it would be a wonderful thank you if you could subscribe and leave me a review on iTunes or elsewhere so thank you so much for that. So let’s jump in. I think that kind of the tyranny of our day-to-day life of the mundane of our task lists, which can be just so endless, including the things in our task lists that are about self-improvement. And those things I know for me can just distract me from what matters most and when we get kind of strapped into the treadmill of these demands, inner demands and outer demands, we lose sight so easily of what might be the two most important questions that we can ask ourselves and those are what are my persistent longings and what brings me the deepest meaning and sense of gratification? When we avoid these questions, which is all too easy to do, it kind of creates a cascade of bad consequences; tension, impatience, a loss of joy and a kind of gray toning of our world. But, there is an act of self-care that almost immediately brings meaning and color and warmth to our lives and this episode is going to teach you that practice.

The Sense of Deep Inner Comfort

All of us have times in our lives when we’re touched with a kind of sense of richer meaning or contentment or fun with loved ones or fun with ourselves and that kind of, maybe rare, but really delicious sense of deep inner comfort. Sometimes, there are just moments of a kind of wordless, nameless gratification and maybe we don’t always even take the time to fully relish that or decipher its meaning. Jung said that, “all neurosis is a flight from suffering” and I think that’s incredibly wise, but I also think that,

A lot of neurosis is a flight from joy because joy is disturbing.

It’s unsettling. It shifts us from our homeostatic state of however happy we think we should be, or we have the right to be, or we deserve to be, and then it also creates this kind of superstitious terror of when is the other shoe going to drop. And it’s kind of destabilizing because it takes us out of our normal range of emotions, those kinds of deeper, more intense joys.

Portals to Happiness

So, we avoid them. But in fact, our moments of happiness, even the small ones, in a way, you could think of them as more than just moments. You could think of them as portals, because they make us happy in that way for a reason. They make us happy in a way because they’re kind of touching cords of deeper meaning within us. And at other times, we may have a kind of sense of sadness or dissatisfaction or emptiness or longing and it’s so easy to experience those feelings as a kind of personal failure, but in fact, really in a way, they’re actually the reverse. They’re a call to a richer, wider, deeper, more meaningful life. And when we keep pressing the snooze button on our longing, what happens over time is that we experience a sense of flatness. It’s like a below the surface anxious emptiness and it taints the quality of our days and it makes us less available for intimacy, for joy. It makes us in less of a place where we can say yes to jumping into the options that life offers us. Often when we feel joy or sorrow that is particularly sharp, or longing that’s particularly sharp, we turn down the volume because we’re just not used to it. Eminently understandable and turning down the volume might be a good thing to do like the psychotherapist Eugene Gendlin said,

“If you want to smell the soup, you don’t stick your face in it.”

Virtuous Cycle of Self-Love

Sometimes things are really hard to bear, but pretending that they’re not going on saddens us and diminishes us overtime and as I said, it makes us less available for the people we love and the options for love that exist in our lives. But, when we heed those messages, the kind of messages embedded in our moments of joy, and the calls embedded in our longing, we kind of initiate a cascade of positive consequences. There’s a sense, maybe not immediately, but then there’s a sense of relief and gratitude and generosity and ease when our “deep in ourself” knows that it’s finally being listened to, and when our longings and our joys and those calls within us finally feel dignified by us, then we start a kind of virtuous cycle of self-love and we all know that,

Self love is at the heart of love of others, that it’s actually a dance back and forth, love with others teaches us self-love.

Often, we can’t learn self-love until we see the love in another person’s eyes. For us, maybe at a moment when we feel like we don’t really deserve it or we’re not feeling particularly loving toward ourselves. This is a gift that we can give ourselves and when we do, we are much more capable of enjoying and growing the love that’s in our lives and of finding and nourishing new love. This is a really simple practice and it just takes minutes.

The Benefits of Micro-meditation

It’s what I call a micro-meditation, and I adore micro-meditations. I do them all the time and the thing that I always say is that I’m a giant advocate of sloppy spiritual practice. And I say that I have been meditating really almost 50 years and I’m a sloppy meditator with horrible concentration. But my meditations are absolutely amazing because I have been meditating badly for almost half a century and they started being amazing way before that. It’s why I continued so you don’t need to reach half a century of bad meditating before you can have wonderful results. This tiny process is going to be really quick, but it’s going to help activate a kind of a cascade of feelings and experiences that come from self-love and it will do that maybe immediately or maybe over time. This is a practice you could do right now as you’re listening, unless you’re driving and if you’re driving and you can keep your eyes open and your concentration going, maybe that’s okay too or you … It’s nice to do it when you’re not feeling rushed, maybe over a cup of coffee or a cup of tea, and you just take a few minutes and you rest and you just start out by kind of reflecting on the ripples of the feelings that you have inside no matter what they are, and as you begin to sense whatever feelings come up, and we can do this right now, just see if you could find words to put on them or if not words, maybe images or if not images, maybe a piece of music.

What Are the Daily Life Joys That Mean the Most to You?

Just take a moment or two to do that. And now, we’re going to ask two questions of ourselves and the first question is, and just kind of reflect on this, kind of roll this around in your thinking, in your head, in your heart, as we go. What are the daily life joys that mean the most to you? What are the things in your day-to-day life that really give you a sense of personal meaning or gratification and the key here is don’t second guess your responses. They might seem silly or strange or superficial, but that’s really okay because they’re not. If something feels true to you right now, just go with it. Let yourself think of some of those things, those daily life joys that just particularly gratify you……. and what if there was a message about who you are and what matters to you most embedded in those moments. What might that be? And what do you think your life would be like if you embrace those moments more fully and you honored them and dignified them and actually place them closer to the center of your days? Just give them a little bit more care, a little bit more honor, a little more place at the table. Think about how you might be able to do that. Now, when you do do that, this is something really wonderful that happens.

An Act of Authentic Self-Love

Your deep insides, you might say your inner child, but a deep core, core early self starts to feel finally respected and listened to. There’s a kind of sigh of relief that happens. And in the blueprint of your life, the closer to the center that you place those joys, the more you will feel this kind of sense of authentic success. Every conscious action that you take toward giving those joys a more central place in your life is an act of authentic self-love, and the deep inner self registers that, and it says, “I’m being respected, I’m being listened to.” And a fascinating thing is the degree to which that tender, vulnerable, deep inner self feels listened to, to that degree, the walls against intimacy, the walls against connection with the world will begin to melt. Those walls that we may feel so frustrated by, these walls that block us from connection. They begin to melt and there are reasons for that that we won’t go into here too much except to say that that young, early, deep, central self, if it thinks you’re not going to take care of it, it takes care of itself by creating things like walls. Things that are called primitive defenses, out of our control. And it’s our deep inside self taking care of itself because it feels like we’re not going to do that well enough. The gift of doing this is that that part of us begins to relax. Here’s the next question. This is a great, great question. What longings persistently arise for you? Just take a minute to think about that.

What Are Some of the Persistent Longings You Have?

Maybe the longings that wake you up at 3:00 in the morning or the longings that you feel maybe when you first wake up or when you go to sleep or at different times during the day. What are some of the persistent longings that you have?

I think that naming and respecting our longings is maybe one of the greatest acts of self-affirmation we can give ourselves and yeah, longing hurts, it aches, it burns, but really, the more it burns and the more it aches, that just means the more urgent its message is.

We do need to watch for the tendency to minimize our longings or ignore them. And the ones that keep coming back, the ones that keep whispering or shouting to us are the ones that we really need to urgently listen to and often, they are about love. Imagine this. Imagine building a plan for your life that places those longings in a place of real importance and that one of your goals becomes to meet the needs of those longings, but the first thing we have to do is to think about what those patterns of longing are. What is it that you’re longing for again and again? For what does that longing come up? Take a moment to think about that wonderful and rich question. It’s so easy to want to ignore those longings because they’re haunting and they’re painful and they make us say, “Oh damn, what am I screwing up here? What am I not doing? What am I failing in so miserably?”

Learn to Dignify Your Longings

But in fact, as I said, one of the most powerful things we can do is instead, learn to dignify our longings. Our longings are some of the greatest gifts we have. They are a homesickness for the things that matter most. And so many of us spend so much of our mental energy avoiding or deflecting our responses to those very two questions. But if you think about it, if you think about what it would be like to put that longing, the one that comes up again and again, that grabs at you, that whispers to you, that calls you to say, “Yes, I have that longing for a reason. It is not just an annoyance. It is not just a humming, annoying piece of electronic that I can’t shut up. It is in fact a homesickness inside me for what matters most and what can I do about that?”

Precious Questions You Need to Dignify

And so often, as I said, it’s about love. So what’s the love it’s about? That’s a really rich and important question. Is it about a broken relationship? Is it about the desire for a partner? Is it about for a sense of community? These are precious, precious questions and they’re questions that deserve to be dignified by us. As you go through your week, I encourage you to notice what your persistent longings are and to start giving them more of a place in the voting table, a BIG place in the voting table of your life and to notice the moments of gratification too, and realize that those are portals to a place of deeper meaning. These are two tools that will enrich your life and move you toward love and move you towards your greatness and your depth so thank you so much for listening. If you enjoyed what you heard here, I’d really appreciate it if you could subscribe and leave me a review and you can go to deeperdatingpodcast.com to learn more about my work, my upcoming intensive, and to join my mailing list. Thank you for joining me and I’ll see you in the next episode.

These four stages lead both to healthy love and profound inner healing; to self-discovery, authentic empowerment and a life much more filled with love. In this episode I’ll guide you through the basics of each of these steps and help you apply them to your own life and journey to healthy love.

Table of Contents

• First Stage: Discovering Your Core Gifts
• Second Stage: Working with Your Attractions
• Third Stage: Leading with Your Gifts
• Last Stage: Rewiring Your Defense Mechanism

Episode Introduction: Journey to Healthy Love

There are four stages of the wiser journey to healthy love. Every one of those stages builds on the last. Everyone heals our lives and helps us move much more directly to the kind of healthy love that we’re dreaming of. Stay tuned to the Deeper Dating Podcast to learn about these four stages, and see where you are within those stages. Hello and welcome to the Deeper Dating podcast. I’m Ken Page. I’m a psychotherapist and coach and author of the bestselling book Deeper Dating. And today I’m going to talk about the four stages of the wiser path to love. This week and every week I’m going to share with you the best tools that I know to help you find healthy, sustainable, beautiful love, and to help it continue to flourish and grow and heal your life in the presence because the real skills of dating are nothing more than the skills of love. And we know that the skills of love are the greatest skills of all for a happy and rich life. And if you want to learn more about this material and this work, my upcoming intensive and courses, just go to deeperdatingpodcast.com. There you’ll find a transcript of this episode and you could also sign up for my mailing list and learn about my free events, my ongoing courses and other resources that I think are really valuable. I also want to say that everything I share in this podcast is educational in nature. It is not medical advice or psychiatric advice. And if you feel that you’re experiencing any serious psychological conditions, please seek professional help.

Subscribe and Leave Ken A Review

And of course if you like what you’re hearing here, it would be wonderful if you could subscribe and leave me a review. Thank you so much for that. And let’s jump in. In thinking so much about the search for love and in my own journey and in my work with many, many, many people, I’ve come to think of this journey as having four stages. And of course we go back and forth between the stages, but there’s a progression in these stages that I really believe in and I want to talk about each one of them. And I’d like you to think about where you are in this journey based on the concept of these stages.

First Stage: Discovering Your Core Gifts

The first stage is what I call the discovery of your core gifts. And if you’ve been listening to my podcasts, you know a bit, a good bit, about how to discover our core gifts and what our core gifts are. But I’m going to kind of start from the beginning here and just describe them in general terms. And the image that I always use is to picture a target. And that target is kind of the zones of your authenticity and the Latin word that the word intimate comes from, or intimacy is the word intimus and it means in most. The closer you get to the inside of this target, the closer you’re getting to the in most authentic self that you are. Your feelings of deepest vulnerability, of greatest passion, the times you feel most touched by life in pain, in joy, in depth, in meaning, in creativity. And the further out you get from the center, the more you’re numbed, the more you’re defended, the more you’re far away from the heat of that inner core. And that inner core is heated because we are all instruments of deep, deep feeling. As you get close to the core, there’s vulnerability, there’s sensitivity, there’s joy, there’s hurt.

Identifying Your Core Gifts

And often all of those feelings can be hard to bear so we protect ourselves. And then in this world, which can be quite a cold world and a complicated world, when those parts of us, those intimate parts of ourselves are revealed and they’re stepped on or even neglected or ignored, the pain is greater because those parts of us are so close to the very core of our authentic self. And when they’re dishonored, it’s like our being is dishonored. And especially when we’re younger, the way we interpret that is that our being is not worth honor. There’s a lot of wounding there and we create defensive selves. In my work, in my classes, in my courses, the first stage of what we always do is a lot of deep and in my book, a lot of deep, rich work around what are our core gifts. And the way we can identify our core gifts, and this is something that you can think about right now is, in your life, what are the things that quicken your heart? That inspire you? That touch you? That feed you? And this is kind of like fingerprints. All of us are inspired by love, by honesty, by bravery, by these basic kind of things. But like fingerprints as well as being universal, they’re completely unique.

The things that spark your heart the most are yours. They’re the language of your inner being and that’s where your core gifts live.

What Quickens Your Heart?

And the same is true with the things that hurt you. We could have a room of people and there could be a whole bunch of different interactions and different ones of us will be hurt and inspired by different portions of the experiences that we all have together. Because we’re all different and it’s part of this richer understanding of self to know what quickens my heart. What speeds my heart? What hurts my heart? And when we begin to look at this, it’s kind of a new understanding of who we are. Then, because what we usually do when things hurt us is to tell ourselves, “Well, I’m probably being too sensitive.” Instead, we learn to dignify those hurts. Not to wallow in them, but to honor and dignify them and say, “All right, what hurt me here? How does that connect with my deepest parts? How is that something I need to treasure?” Now most of us don’t do that. We might fight back, we might get defensive, we might hide these parts, we might suppress them, we might shame ourselves, we might shame the other person. But the act of honoring, the act of honoring what hurt you and why, is very, very powerful. And I’ll just share an example of that. I was recently with a group of people and there was an artist and this artist shared some of her work and I was so incredibly excited by what she did. It was just mind blowing to me. And I was just bursting with desire to talk about it, but she didn’t feel comfortable talking about it and so kind of everything I said was dismissed.

Dignifying Your Core Gift

And other people weren’t as interested or excited as I was so the conversation continued. I ended up being kind of hurt. And it was a hurt that I told myself was silly to have, because what? We didn’t talk about the art and my heart was bursting with excitement about it, but that wasn’t such an important thing and no one else seemed bothered. But because of the work that I am learning and have learned to do, I instead dignified that part of me. And I thought, this is a core gift of mine. The way that art hits me and touches me is intense. It’s intense and I need space to honor that. And no one else was really giving the space so it makes sense that I was hurt. Now that didn’t take the pain away immediately. But man, it relieved my heart and I knew who I was in a richer way and I was celebrating and honoring myself. There was nothing I did externally about this except later talked to my husband about kind of how difficult that was for me. But there was nothing externally I did. The process was honoring that part of me. What are the things like that for you in your day to day life that hurt you in particular ways that you might think, “oh, I’m just being too sensitive here.” Or that you were trained to think that. See if anything comes to mind. And if so, follow that process. How could I dignify that? How does it make sense given my innate gifts that that hurt me and bothered me in a particular way? And what might be the gift there?

Honoring the Origin of Your Being

Because we get the most wounded around the places where our deepest gifts lie.

That’s just one tiny example, but here is how this connects to the search for love and it speaks of a deeper physics in the search for love. And this is what it is, the degree to which we honor those deep, deep, deep, innate, intimate parts of ourselves, the most authentic core of who we are, to that degree, as we learn to dignify those parts of ourselves which have roots in a place so profound that it’s kind of wordless. They’re the essence and the origin of our being. They’re the center of our being. They’re the source of self in a way. The more we honor and dignify those parts, the more we will be sexually and romantically attracted to people who are good for us and to situations that are good for us. The more we denigrate those parts or the more we’re ambivalent or we suppress those parts or we think, well I can’t really honor those parts unless the world proves to me that they’re worth honoring. The more we feel that way, the more we will be drawn into masochistic situations and the more we’ll be sexually and romantically attracted to people who are not available or not good for us.

That’s why the true journey to intimacy has to begin with a deep self honoring and that’s the first stage.

Second Stage: Working with Your Attractions

And in my book, Deeper Dating and again in my courses and my upcoming intensive, you can learn how to identify and articulate your own core gifts. It’s a beautiful and important process. As we learn to do that, things shift, really things begin to shift. There is a reorganization of self based on these beautiful core parts of ourselves and our worlds begin to shift. And often in my intensives, people say, “All right, I’m not going to date for a little bit because this is kind of so powerful that I just want to sit with me for a while.” Then the second stage is the stage of working with our attractions. Everybody tells us that the kind of the heart of finding love is you have to make yourself more attractive. But really obsessing over that is the path to personal hell as well as bad relationships. It is great to make ourselves look good. It is great to look good. It’s great to be in shape. It’s great to do all those things. It’s great to have natural confidence, but when we think that that’s going to be what leads us to love, we go afield because you can’t be yourself and this airbrushed version of yourself at the same time. As wonderful as it is to become more attractive and to work on our attractiveness, obsession with that or thinking that’s going to lead you to love is really, it’s what it is, is it looks like self improvement but it’s self hate in a really sexy outfit.

Observe The Patterns

Around the subject of attractions, what gives us the hugest bang for our buck is to become a student of who we are attracted to. And if you make a list of all the people – in my book in chapter five, I have people do this. If you make a list of all, let’s just say the negative attractions, the relationships that didn’t work and you note the kind of negative difficult qualities. No, I’m not saying that you weren’t a part of that, we’re always a part of those things. But just for the purpose of this exploration, if you notice and you write down the negative qualities that appeared in your partners, maybe in somewhat different forms, but basically similar, you will see patterns and those patterns are hugely important for two main reasons. One, because it teaches you what you need to look out for so that you can learn from your history and get more and more sensitive to those attributes. Two, and this is a profound thing, there’s the question of why were you drawn to someone like this again and again? And there’s a lot of rich exploration there, but what I want to say in the broadest way is,

“When we become a student of our attractions, we make much better choices in our dating life.”

Educate Your Attractions

And now another piece that is really important in this subject of understanding our attractions, because we cannot force our sexual attractions, we can’t do it. We can’t force our romantic attractions. Either it’s there or it’s not. However, we can educate those attractions. And when we do, we find that we start to make really different choices. This understanding of old patterns is a really rich and important thing. The other piece of that is understanding the positive patterns. Who were the people you were with who made you feel safe? Who inspired you by who they were? Who inspired you by their decency, their availability and their care? Those are what I call your attractions of inspiration and those are gold and you also have that circuitry within you. And when we make this kind of existential choice to say we are only going to pursue our attractions of inspiration. In other words, people with whom our hearts in an essential and basic and pretty much consistent way feel safe. People who inspire us by who they are, how they treat others and how they treat us. Those are attractions of inspiration and as much as we could be turned on to the bad boys, the bad girls, the unavailable people, and we all can, we also have a circuitry where we can be attracted to people who inspire us for all the ways I mentioned. And there comes a point in our journey where we say, “I’m done. I’m done with those other sexy, spicy turn on relationships that lead to heartbreak. And I’m just going to choose inspiration. Yes, I have to be sexually attracted, but I’m only going to choose people who I’m sexually attracted to who are also attractions of inspiration.”

Third Stage: Leading with Your Gifts

When we make those choices, when we discover our core gifts and decide to dignify them, when we learn these lessons around our attraction, our field, our kind of magnetic field somehow begins to shift. And this is something else that I’ve seen again and again in my work. That when we make those choices we find, when we get out there, we meet people who are different. We’re attracted to people who are different, and there’s mutual attraction to different people because we’ve kind of changed our atomic structure in a way where we’re organized from the inside out in a healthier way. This really happens, and I would say it’s the closest thing to a miracle that I see in this work, is watching how beautifully this happens and how it does happen when you take these steps. The third step is getting out there in different ways, leading with your gifts, leading with your soul. And there’s so much here, so much rich material that I won’t be able to get into here. But I will just say a few things. There are ways to do your online dating in a way that you’re leading with your gifts and you only look for attractions of inspiration. Your profile needs to show who you are. Your photos need to show you glowing, not just you sexy and attractive, but you glowing because the right people will pick up on that. Your profile needs to show who you are and you want to look for profiles that seem like they could be attractions of inspiration. In your online interactions, show your best self, show your generosity, your kindness, your decency. And look for others who seem to be the same.

Last Stage: Rewiring Your Defense Mechanism

And this is the one single sentence that I ask people to hold as the leader of their process. As kind of their cutting edge place. And that is, “does my soul feel safe with this person?” That’s the big question. Of course there’s so many other questions, but when you lead with that question, you instantly dignify your core gifts. I’ll just say another piece about this too. One of the best ways to meet people is through events, actual in person events with people who share your values. That’s just something I want to say that I think is incredibly important. And if you’re really serious, add that into your repertoire. It’ll make a big difference. And finally, I just want to speak briefly about that last phase. And the last phase is a phase of rewiring because when we meet someone who is an attraction of inspiration, we need to unwire the ways we’ve learned to defend ourselves in the presence and the fear and the risk of real intimacy. We have to unwire those ways and we have to learn to empower and protect ourselves based on our authenticity instead of based on our old defense mechanisms. We need to learn to be able to have sex in a way that it is hot and exciting, but safe spiritually and connected intimately.

We need to learn how to be able to talk about the things that hurt us. We need to be able to learn how to treasure our partners and offer them that same safety.

Ask Ken

And we need to bring that kind of deeper authenticity into the journey as well as entire skill sets that teach us how to build attraction. And I talk about this in other podcasts as well. I talk about all these different things in different podcasts, but we need to learn those skills because in the presence of a healthy relationship, the tasks that we need to do, the skills that we need to do are different. But what is so beautiful about that is that they are generative tasks. They’re tasks that lead to more love instead of empty frustration. The more we do these acts of wisdom and love, the richer the love becomes in our lives. And we can’t do that if we don’t know how to dignify our core. And if we haven’t chosen someone who is safe and inspiring in a basic way. These are the four stages that I think you can see, not only help lead to love, but heal our entire lives and our journeys. I hope this information was helpful to you, I want to encourage you again to go to deeperdatingpodcast.com, join my mailing list, learn more about this work, go to Ask Ken on that website, and you can leave me messages that’ll be recorded and I’ll do my best to answer them on the podcast. And also please, if you could, subscribe and leave a review. Thank you so much and I hope this was a helpful episode for you. See you in the next episode.

If you want to combine, risk, skills, insight and dating adventures, don’t miss these three practices. Your dating skills will grow–a lot. You’ll also learn more about yourself, take some fabulous risks, and have fun in the process. Enjoy these lovely mindfulness challenges. They’re simple, deep, and yes, exciting!

Table of Contents

• Exercise One: Notice Your Patterns
• Exercise Two: Plan a Second Trip
• Exercise Three: Approach One Person Who Is Attractive to You

Episode Introduction: Dating Adventures

Mindfulness is not just for meditating, it’s for dating too. And in this episode you will learn three mindfulness practices that will open your eyes, open your mind, and open up your dating adventures to new possibilities. So stay tuned to the Deeper Dating Podcast to learn more. Hello everybody and welcome to the Deeper Dating Podcast. I’m Ken Page and today I’m going to share with you a few mindfulness practices that can have a profound impact on your entire dating adventures. This week and every week I’ll share the greatest tools I know with you to help you find beautiful, sustainable love and to keep it flourishing and heal your life in the process. Because the skills of dating are nothing more than the skills of love, and the skills of love are the greatest skills of all for a happy life. And if you want to learn more about this path and this approach, please just go to DeeperDatingPodcast.com and you can learn about my upcoming intensive and classes and you can also join my mailing list and receive the first two chapters of my bestselling book, Deeper Dating: How to Drop the Games of Seduction and Discover the Power of Intimacy, which was excerpted by Oprah and was an Amazon bestseller. You can also get a transcript of this entire episode if you go there.

Leave Ken A Review

Also, everything I share in this podcast is educational in nature. It’s not psychiatric or medical advice or treatment of any kind. If you’re experiencing any serious psychological conditions, please seek professional help. And finally, if you like what you’re hearing here, I would so appreciate it if you could subscribe and leave me a review. I’ve gotten such beautiful reviews and they just mean so much to me, so thank you for that. And let’s jump in.

Dating as an Adventure of Self-Discovery

The search for a loving partner is one of our greatest life tasks. But so much dating advice, as we know, is just gratingly superficial and it focuses endlessly on the power of seduction and tight glutes and abs and fake confidence. So I’m going to offer you today in this podcast, three exercises that will approach dating as an adventure of self-discovery. And every one of them is going to be eyeopening and they can be kind of fun and they’re going to help you grow in self-respect while opening up new possibilities in your dating life. I’ll just share a little bit of my story and how I learned these exercises. At a certain point in my life I had gotten particularly sick of my failure-ridden dating life. I started asking friends and therapists for help. I knew I needed it. I had kind of hit bottom with my incredible lack of success in finding love and I really wanted to find love. I just felt that whatever it was, you needed to be able to seduce people and be attractive enough, I lacked. There was some “it” that I lacked and that was a very, very depressing thought. At a certain point though, I realized I needed help, like what I was thinking couldn’t have been totally true. I had a really good friend and he was really skilled at bringing humanity into his dating life, all the ups and downs and craziness of it. And I really respected him for that.

Mindfulness, Compassion and Kindness

I asked him to start taking me on dating field trips and the tools that I learned from him and from a wonderful therapist that I went to see had a huge impact on me. Mindfulness, compassion and kindness, who knew that those were the things that were going to help you with successful dating? Those were certainly not any of the things I learned. But I was really happy to hear that, in fact, they have everything to do with successful dating. So for these exercises, and I describe these in greater detail in my book, Deeper Dating, I really, really encourage you to enlist the help of a friend. Best of all would be a learning partner, a dating buddy, somebody who is also doing this process, is also single and who will kind of support you in taking these mindfulness dating field trips, maybe go with you and afterwards you could have coffee. Even if you’re not in the same city, you can meet together and just discuss what worked, what didn’t work, and laugh about it and complain about it and just have that wonderful kind of camaraderie that we really need around dating. But if you don’t have someone to do that with or you just prefer to do it alone and you can’t be convinced, and I understand that. I did a lot of these alone, then just do this and bring a journal or some paper or pen with you so that afterwards you could sit in a coffee shop or go somewhere and just reflect a little bit.

Exercise One: Notice Your Patterns

Okay, so the first exercise is just simply to notice your patterns. So the next time you go to a party, a bar, a club, a gathering, wherever there are single people, just try this exercise. So this is part one. Part one is change nothing in what you do. Just notice your behavior and notice your feelings. Notice your patterns. Who do you talk to? Who do you avoid? Do you approach people you’re interested in or do you wait for them to approach you? Do you only approach people you’re super attracted to or do you stay away from those people? Do you avoid the whole dating thing completely? What do you do? It’s such a fascinating thing to look at the kind of pockets of semi-safety we create for our self. Do you drink a lot? And here’s another rich question. How are you different when you’re with someone you’re attracted to? What parts of your enthusiasm and your heart and your authenticity do you tend to suppress in the presence of those people? That’s a huge question. There are no wrong answers. This is just a process of noticing your behaviors and noticing kind of the flow of your feelings. That’s it. That’s all you need to do for part one. Afterwards, just do a postmortem with your learning partner or with yourself and just kind of notice what you saw in terms of your patterns. And if you’re sharing it with someone, you can each share with each other and not critique each other, not evaluate, but just understand, identify. We’re not fixing anything yet. We are just looking. And let me tell you,

“Looking and seeing our patterns is a WAY brave act.”

Pick One Small Change

Okay, so here’s part B of this process. Now pick one small change that you would like to experiment with in your next outing, but make it small. Don’t make it huge or vast. Make it small but worthy. Maybe you chose that you are going to drink less or maybe if you’re always the aggressor, you might practice being less action-oriented. There are countless possibilities for small shifts in behavior. Just choose one that interests you and make sure that the change you’re trying for is one that you pretty much think you could stretch toward. And even a slight change, even a slight change, which is why we’re going to go for something small here, is going to open up new insights and it’ll give you a kind of liberating sense of possibility. Here’s an example. Jill decided to try this exercise at a birthday party where she’d be the guest of a friend. That friend happened to be her learning partner and she knew she would only know a few people there. So here are some of the things that she noticed when she did step one. She said she felt really shy when she arrived. Her learning partner was coordinating the event, so she was really on her own. She said she went straight to the food and the drink table. She felt kind of embarrassed to be alone and kind of like she was standing out like a sore thumb. She knew that wasn’t true, but that is how she felt. I think all of us can really relate to that.

Set a New Goal for Yourself

Then she found another woman who was standing alone, so she smiled at her and they started to talk and they had some interesting professional connections. She noticed too that there were a few guys that she wanted to meet, but she did not know how. She kept kind of thinking ways to meet them but didn’t go through with any of them. Then she left the party, feeling pleased that she made a new friend, and kind of mildly depressed or disappointed that she hadn’t met any guys. She realized, upon reflection, that this was a pattern. She avoided the risk of interacting with guys who might be single and available. She knew she was super social and she could have a good time, but she realized that she was actually really avoiding her growing edge and she was kind of disappointed in that. So she set a new goal for herself and she shared it with her learning partner. The next time she was going to make a plan to meet her learning partner in the middle of the party, whenever that next party was. They were just going to connect together somehow during the middle of the party. And she would be obligated to point out one or two guys that she was interested in. And if she knew them, if her friend knew them, she’d help make an introduction.

Exercise Two: Plan a Second Trip

Her friend is a real estate agent, so she knows lots and lots of people. And if she didn’t know them, the two of them would talk together about how to get Jill to actually talk to that person. Jill was really happy with this because it was hard. It was scary, but she knew that there would be a sense of aliveness, adventure and growth and she had the support of a friend. Okay. So that is exercise number one. So now exercise two is to do this. It’s to plan a second trip, hopefully with the support or even the company of your learning partner, or if not someone that you tell in advance, this is called book ending, someone you tell in advance, “This is my goal. I’m going to do my best to do it and when this is over, I’m going to report to you on how we did, on how I did.” Because we need this kind of help. We really, really all do. So that’s what you do. You plan a second trip, you make … and it’s a trip to make the shift you described. You notice how that feels and how it leaves you feeling. And then you bookend it. After you do it, you describe what it was like.

Do Something New

So Jill did it. She went to the party and she happily avoided any of the guys that she was interested in. In the middle of the party she met her learning partner, and her learning partner and her talked about who she was interested in. There was one person she was particularly interested in and her learning partner did not know that guy. So they strategized about what they were going to do to have Jill meet this person. They came up with a plan, which was that the two of them were going to approach this guy together. But it turns out, and this happens so often once we kind of activate our intentions, someone else came into the picture who was very interested in this and knew that guy. So she was able to introduce Jill to this guy. So it wasn’t a match. Jill found the guy kind of really self-absorbed and she was not really interested in him, although they had an okay conversation. But that was it. Jill was psyched because she did something new. She did something brave. She felt kind of exhilarated and she had learned something. So when we keep doing these practices, we build a muscle of bravery. We build a muscle of courage. We feel more alive, we feel more invigorated, and we experience this grueling dating process as somewhat more of an adventure. So now we’ve done the step. We’ve done the first exercise, which is noticing our patterns. We’ve done the second exercise, which was setting an intention for something new, following through and then doing a postmortem and sharing about it.

Exercise Three: Approach One Person Who Is Attractive to You

Now, exercise three, this is bravery. This is a scary one, but I really encourage you not to skip it. This time, you’re going to go somewhere and commit to approaching one person who is attractive to you. You’re going to do it sober, and you’re going to approach that person with warmth and authenticity. If you want to up the ante, do it with two or three people. I did this process once and I did it with six people. I was rejected by six people, serially, at a club. But I didn’t feel bad. I actually felt incredibly proud because I had achieved my goal.

Rejection was not so much a factor here as bravery and courage.

So try one, maybe two or three if you want. See if you can make eye contact and smile before walking up to the person. And then if they don’t notice you and you don’t think you’re going to have another opportunity to get eye contact, you could simply go up to them anyway. That might be deliciously scary or it might be terrifying. So if you don’t feel ready for that part of the exercise, modify it to something easier, like even just finding out if any of your friends know this person and might introduce you at a later time.

But if you can do this exercise, you’re going to feel pumped when you’re done, even if your interest wasn’t reciprocated. And remember, your goal in this exercise is not to get an expression of interest, although that’s nice. It is to build your all-important muscle of dating bravery and bringing consciousness and mindfulness and skill to this process.

Developing Your Muscle of Bravery

And really, really it does get easier. When I used to run Deeper Dating events, there was a section where people had to do this. They had to go up to people they didn’t know. The rule was always the same. They would give their phone number, this was a long time ago. They would just give their phone number on a piece of paper and the other person had to accept it. They didn’t have to contact the person, but they couldn’t say no. They had to say, “Thank you,” and they had to take a moment and just kind of inwardly appreciate this person’s interest in them. They didn’t have to contact the person, once again. But this is how people develop this muscle of bravery. They would come back to future Deeper Dating events and say, “I did it. I was in a bus, I was in a subway, I was on the street, and I actually smiled at somebody and then we talked. I wouldn’t have done it if I hadn’t practiced this kind of muscle building bravery practice.” Another thing that you can do is go with your learning partner and do it together, and just connect throughout the night or afternoon to catch each other up and share war stories and afterwards maybe go celebrate.

Connect with People Who Share The Same Values

Now, I want to say, in terms of venue, the more it is a venue for people who share your values, the better you will do. So I just want to say that you will have more success, more fun, and much more chance of finding and building something if you do it at an event for people who share your values, whatever those are; volunteer work or hiking or meditation or music, anything, dance, whatever it is. And so, as with any area of our lives, bringing more mindfulness and compassion to the way that you date will almost always open new doors. And as you deepen your insights about your dating life, you will find that the kind of people you meet and date actually begins to change in surprising, hopeful ways. So please try these exercises and share them with us by going to DeeperDatingPodcast.com and then clicking on Ask Ken. You can actually record your experiences with these exercises. So enjoy tackling your dating life as a journey of growth and discovery. Again, if you like what you heard here, please do subscribe and give me a positive review because that is much appreciated. I look so forward to seeing you on the next episode of the Deeper Dating Podcast. Thank you.

No matter whether you’re in early dating or long-term love, there are research-backed tools to deepen sexual desire while creating closeness, affection and romantic thrill. In this episode you’ll learn how to spark deep love, profound bonding and sexual deliciousness in your relationship. These aren’t games or gimmicks–they are the lifelong tools of building attraction and deeper love.

Table of Contents

• Foundational Caveats
• The LOVEratory Experiment
• Evoking Eros
• Play With Possibilities

Episode Introduction: Building Attraction

You meet somebody new, you really like them and you want to make sure that the attraction on both sides grows and deepens. What are some tools to help you do that? Stay tuned to the Deeper Dating podcast to learn research-backed tools to help you deepen erotic and romantic connection. Hello everybody and welcome to the Deeper Dating podcast. I’m so glad you’re here. I’m Ken Page and I’m a psychotherapist, and a coach, and the author of the bestselling book Deeper Dating. And today we’re going to be talking about how you can build attraction to someone new in your life who maybe you think they’re really a great person, but the excitement is not there enough yet. And you can also use these tools if you’re very excited about somebody you’re dating, if you’ve been in a relationship five years, or if you’ve been in a relationship for 50 years. So I’m very excited to share these research-backed tools for deepening intimacy and attraction today. So this week and every week, I’m going to share with you the greatest tools I know to help you find love and keep it flourishing and heal your entire life in the process because the skills of dating are nothing more than the deep skills of intimacy. And the deep skills of intimacy are the greatest skills for happy, rich, meaningful life.

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts and Leave Ken a Review

So if you like what you’re learning here, just go to deeperdatingpodcast.com, you can get the first two chapters for free of my book, Deeper Dating, which teach you how to discover your core gifts. You can get a free ebook. You can also get a transcript of this entire episode, which I really recommend because these tools are ones you’re going to refer to at any different point in your relationship, future and history. These tools that you’re going to be learning today are ones that you’re going to want to remember, and refer to, and use at any point in the future of your entire intimacy journey. You’ll also learn a lot more about the work that I’m doing, a lot of the free content that I offer and some of my intensives and upcoming classes as well. And finally, I just want to say that this podcast is educational in nature. It’s not medical or psychiatric advice, and if you feel that you have a serious psychological condition, please do seek help. Okay, so let us begin. So here’s what I want to say first…

Foundational Caveats

I guess these are some kind of foundational caveats and insights for beginning this part of the journey. The first is we all know that we cannot force sexual and romantic attraction no matter how good we think someone is for us. If there’s not a spark, there’s not a spark. Maybe that spark will come, but we can’t really decide that ourselves. We can kind of prime the field to have that be able to happen using these techniques, but we can’t make a spark happen if it’s not there. But if there is a spark there we can blow wind on that spark to make it turn into a flame, and we can add paper, and we can add twigs and, who knows, maybe even kerosene. There are things that we can do to honor, and cultivate, and grow, and nourish that spark. And that’s what we’re going to be talking about here. The other caveat is that the techniques we’re going to be talking about are going to open your heart. They’re going to deepen your sense of vulnerability because vulnerability is the soil in which intimacy grows or part of the soil. They will make you more vulnerable. They will open your heart. And so you want to use these techniques to deepen love and deepen attraction with someone who is an attraction of inspiration. And I speak a lot about the two different circuitries we have where we can be attracted to people by their inspiring qualities, by their consistency, by their availability. Or we could be attracted by that sense that we almost have won love from them, but we haven’t quite yet.

Attractions of Deprivation

And we’re going to do everything we can to finally get them to love us right. Those are attractions of deprivation. And I don’t encourage that you use these techniques in those attractions because that could, ultimately, cause great pain. And finally, as I always say, if either you or your partner has a serious substance abuse addiction or significant psychiatric disorder that is not stabilized these techniques won’t stick, they won’t last, and they could even backfire. So if any of those things are the case, I just deeply encourage you to address those issues. So the researcher, Eli Finkel wrote a wonderful article in the New York Times, and he talked about some insights about attraction. And just to kind of summarize what he said, he said essentially that,

“The more you get to know someone the more the chemistry between the two of you takes over from your typical standard ways of deciding who’s attractive and who isn’t.”

So many of us have a kind of tyranny of type, like it’s got to be that type. It’s got to be that hair color, it’s got to be that height, it’s got to be that waist size, it’s got to be that whatever, whatever the thing is. And some of us have a really bad tyranny of type and some of us are much more flexible. I know that I had a really bad one for a long time and these tools and techniques that we’re going to be talking about in this episode, and the next episode are going to help you to learn to get past that if that’s an issue for you.

Tendrils of Connection

Dr. Finkel’s research showed that,

The more you get to know someone the more your typical standards of what attractive is begin to get eclipsed by the quality of the connection.

Now, obviously, there are limits to that. This is not a black and white thing, but it’s an important thing to know how that happens. That’s kind of the whole concept of courting, which is you meet somebody, you meet them in an environment that’s going to be non-sexual in the beginning. You get to know them. There’s shyness, there’s timidity, there’s a sense of connection, and in time maybe there’s a sense of match. Maybe there’s a sense of chemistry and that grows, but you don’t jump right into sex. You don’t get high, or drunk, and then jump into bed, you don’t do those things. You let these kind of tendrils of connection cultivate and then it’s a really wonderful thing because everything gets more exciting, it gets more tender, it gets more original, and the feelings of real bonding begin to develop. So it’s good, and we’re going to talk about that at a later point, about waiting a little bit with sex, and why that’s a really good thing. But the concept of courting kind of captures some of this. I’d like you to take a minute and think, have you ever been in a situation where an attraction for someone grew? Like maybe at first you were a little attracted to them, but then the attraction really grew. Or maybe even you weren’t attracted to them, you didn’t think of them in that way, but you see them in a certain light at a certain time or doing a certain thing and all of a sudden you think, “I am attracted to that person.”

The LOVEratory Experiment

The truth is that sexual and romantic attraction is much more plastic. It is much more changeable than we give it and we give ourselves credit for. And that change happens in the medium of the actual quality of connection with another person, which is going to be the heart and soul of all the tools that we talk about in this, and the next episode. So the renowned researcher, Arthur Aron, created this process by which he said, and of course, he was being a little bit playful here, but he said we can actually create love in a laboratory. And he created a process that involved 36 questions. And these 36 questions supposedly, and actually, the laboratory study involved the questions plus a few other things, but these 36 questions were questions that, basically in a gradual way, got two people to share in more and more vulnerable, and thoughtful, and personal ways. In the laboratory experiment there were other components, which involved eye contact, and which involved finding out that the other person was actually interested in you as part of the process. So you had that sense of safety and excitement of knowing that. So there are a few parts of this that are really important. One part is that the sharing of your vulnerable self matched with the other person’s really receiving it, appreciating it, identifying with it, relating to it, enjoying it creates Eros, creates bond, creates chemistry because when you share something vulnerable like that it’s like being on a trapeze, and kind of flying off. You’re in space, you don’t know how you’ll be received and there’s a vulnerability attached to that.

One of the Greatest Aphrodisiacs

When the other person catches you, ah, there’s an amazing thing that happens, a wonderful feeling. And that’s why folks,

Deep listening is one of the greatest aphrodisiacs there is. If you’re with someone, they’re talking about something and you really, really listen.

You listen with your heart, you listen with your head, you really listen and you show interest in what they’re talking about it’s very powerful. That kind of attention is even more powerful than compliments in many cases, just listening to somebody. But so when you share ever more vulnerable parts of yourself, appropriately of course, and you’re with someone who gets it, oh my God, it’s just a fabulous thing. And, like I said, that builds connection. Another related thing that builds connection, interestingly enough, is fear – fear and risk.

So because when you share deeper vulnerability, you’re putting yourself in a kind of risky and scary position, that intensifies Eros.

And I’m not going to go into experiments and research on this in this episode, but there’s fascinating research in about how true that is. But enough to say that that leap of vulnerability, and having the other person meet you is a very exciting thing, and really does build bond. Another one is touch, and there’s lots of research on this as well. Craig Malkin out of Harvard has written about this quite a bit, that what happens with touch, with warm just non-sexual touch, like resting your hand on somebody’s hand, like putting your arm around them, like touching them in gentle ways creates oxytocin. And he says that multiple lines of research show that,

“The more touch there is, the more this cuddle hormone, oxytocin, is activated the deeper, and the richer the bonds can become.”

What a Touch Can Do

So when your impulse is to touch in a gentle way, assuming that the other person kind of is with that, and gives you permission, and is comfortable with it, when that’s your impulse it’s something to really go with. And yeah, there are rich feelings that ripple out when we do that, even just holding somebody’s hand. There’s research, great research about what holding hands can do to someone’s whole metabolism, but what it does to our heart is it softens our heart.

Let yourself just remember a time when touch softened your heart, or when you touched someone and it softened their heart, and kind of moved things forward.

Now, I want to come back to compliments. Research shows that playing hard to get may make somebody want you more temporarily and not necessarily for the best reasons, but it makes them like you less. In fact, what works better is if someone gets the sense that you are a person of discrimination, that you’re not just kind of needy and just looking for anybody, but there are certain qualities and attributes that are really important to you. And that this person has those attributes, and that’s really special, and a big deal. That is a powerful aphrodisiac. And research backs that up and proves that. So when there’s something you like about somebody, a quality, an attribute of their personality, of the way they live their life articulate that for them, tell them that. And two things are going to happen. One thing that’s going to happen is your heart will open a little bit because what we appreciate, appreciates, and that’s going to kind of like make your heart swell a little bit as you tell them that even though it might be nervous-making.

Evoking Eros

And what it replicates, in Arthur Aron’s experiment, is letting somebody know that you’re interested in a little way that just gives that message that you like them and that you’re interested, and that kind of really evokes Eros too. Now, I know we haven’t talked about sexual attraction and maybe you’re thinking, well, these things are really nice, but most of these I could really do with a friend and yeah, of course, these would spark greater closeness and that’s a wonderful thing, but what about sex? What about sexual attraction? So I’m going to say a couple of things about that now, and we’re going to talk about that more in some more detail in the next episode. But here’s what I want to say about that now. Once again, you cannot pressure yourself. Eros is like this beautiful kind of exotic bird that can land on your shoulder, your attraction for someone. But one of the things that makes that bird fly away is pressure. And I want to say again,

“Just because someone’s a good person does not mean that you need to be romantically, or sexually attracted to them. It is not your obligation.”

So there needs to be space there. But, let’s say, you’re dating someone and there are parts of them that you’re physically attracted to, there are ways that you’re kind of turned on to them, but maybe there are attributes that you’re just not really turned on to.

Cultivating Attraction to Love

So here’s the deal with that, here is what in my decades and decades of experience as a psychotherapist seeing people in that situation, and in my own experience in that situation, here’s what I think happens. You don’t need to make the decision now because in time the decision will become clearer for you. The positive end of this is as your connection grows, as the chemistry grows, as you become more kind of dependent on them, more excited by them, more connected to them all these different things, it could well be that those things that you’re not attracted to just become less important. Your sexual connection might be wonderful and in that sexual connection those particular things might also become less important, the things that are not attractive to you. But you can also cultivate that, and you can cultivate that by picking body parts, attributes, qualities that do turn you on and letting yourself fixate on them a little bit in privacy with yourself. You can kind of even fantasize and eroticize, and even have sexual fantasies about parts of them that you’re attracted to, and things you would like to do with them. So, maybe sticking with the “would like to do” kind of part of this, maybe you’re with someone and you feel, “You know, I do not want to have full on sex. I have no desire to do that with that person. That’s not what my attraction is. Could we touch lips? Could we kiss? Would I want to cuddle them? Would I maybe want to touch? Would I want to hold hands in the movies? Maybe some of those things I would want to do.”

The Result of Intoxication

So those are all the things you do. And the other person is an adult, and it is their job to be a big enough person to, even if they want more, to honor that you’re only doing what you’re going to do, and you’re going to go at the pace that you need to go at, and you have every right to do that. So thinking about what you want to do physically, and not doing anything more. And that is a great thing about not getting intoxicated in early dating is because when you do get intoxicated you’re going to cross the lines of your own inner safety. And sex without, pretty much, kind of equal degree of safety and emotional connection is like Miracle-Gro for our fear of intimacy. We either get really attached and clingy after the sex, and needy and insecure. Or we just want to get out of dodge. We just want to get away and go back to the thrill of the hunt. Or maybe we kind of create a wall inside our hearts and inside our beings, and we think, “Well, this is just hookup material here. So that’s a really key point though, is to honor your boundaries around physical connection, and around the pressure of that. So you meet this person, you like them, there’s some spark, you’re in a very organic way using these techniques. Over time, feelings are starting to grow, and develop, and the chemistry is increasing, and the Eros is increasing. You can also, I want to say, allow yourself the delight of sexually really fantasizing about what you would like to do with this person. And that’s a great thing to do, to cultivate Eros.

Play With Possibilities

Assuming it’s an attraction of inspiration and assuming that, and this is the question that I tell people to ask themselves all the time, does my soul feel safe with this person? If the answer’s yes, I encourage you to let yourself sexually fantasize, play with possibilities of what you would love to do. Because all of that creates these kind of invisible tendrils of connection where you’re becoming erotically and romantically specialized in this person. And that’s a wonderful thing. And when there is a sense of sexual heat, and sexual desire, and sexual compassion, and it’s combined with trust, and it’s combined with the feeling of love, and a sense of the goodness of this person that is like a quiet explosion of pure paradise. And that’s what we want, that’s what we want to go for. So there are many more techniques that I’m going to talk about and there’s more really amazing research that backs all of this up. And I’m going to be talking about some of those things in the next episode. But I just want to address one concern – you might be asking, “Well, is this really fair to the other person? Because I’m not that full on attracted to them and they might be falling in love with me, and I’m going really slow. And meanwhile their feelings are growing. And I still don’t know.” What I want to say is, in my opinion, it is unfair not to do this because who knows what’s going to happen? You might end up more in love with this person than they are with you.

Anti-courting Culture

Or maybe you both agree that this is not going to be a match, but if there’s a possibility that the feelings are going to grow there is a risk that both of you do need to take. And as long as you’re honest with the other person about where you’re at they’re an adult and it’s really their job to take care of themselves as long, again, as you’re honest. And so, there’s a kind of culture where it’s an anti-courting culture. It’s a swipe right, swipe left culture, and we don’t give the time that’s needed for that inner growing of just like in the body when we build new muscle we have to create new capillaries to feed that muscle. And that’s a process that takes time. The same thing happens with your erotic and romantic connection. So yeah, you have every right to allow yourself and the other person the possibility of seeing if this grows because it might, in fact, become something wonderful. The other question you might have is, “Hey, is this fair to me? Because I’m kind of attracted to this person but not super attracted to them, and I don’t want to subject myself to a lifetime of being in a relationship where I’m only sort of attracted.”

Afterwords

And what I want to say to that is, “That’s right. You don’t want to be in a relationship like that, but only time will tell.” And remember that how attracted you are in the beginning can grow and change in really deep ways. So yeah, long-term, if your attraction never grows this is probably not at all a good idea, but the chances are great that if this is an attraction of inspiration, and if there is a slow growth, and there is a spark, and the chemistry is increasing I would say stick around because you have the potential of something really wonderful here. So thank you all. We will continue with this in our next episode, and what I just want to say is, if you like what you’re hearing here it would be fabulous if you could subscribe, and leave me a review. And, again, go to deeperdatingpodcast.com to learn about my upcoming intensives, and classes, and free content. And thank you all so much for listening, and I look forward to seeing you on the next episode of The Deeper Dating podcast.

In this episode, I’ll share a simple way to stay connected to your heart, develop your sense of discrimination, and lead you most quickly to the healthy love you desire. All in one easy-to-remember acronym: the word BASICS.

Table of Contents

• B.A.S.I.C.S.
• Keeping Your Heart Safe
• Hook, Line, and Sinker
• Aligning Yourself to the Path of Love

Episode Introduction: Healthy Love

I love simple ways to remember life’s deepest truths. In this episode, you’re going to learn a simple acronym that will help you claim self-love, increase your capacity for discrimination, and find healthy love in the quickest way possible. Stay tuned to the Deeper Dating Podcast to learn more. Hello and welcome to The Deeper Dating Podcast. I’m Ken Page, a psychotherapist and coach and author of the bestselling book Deeper Dating: How to Drop the Games of Seduction and Discover the Power of Intimacy. And today I’m going to teach you an acronym. It’s the word BASICS that’s going to help you get in sync and in line with your deepest values, your deepest gifts, and your greatest sense of discrimination, all of which will help you find love in the quickest and easiest and wisest way possible.

What the Listeners are Saying

If you want to learn more about the deeper dating approach, you can just go to deeperdatingpodcast.com and you can get a transcript of this episode as well as learn about my new upcoming intensive other projects I’m working on. And you can receive a free ebook that teaches four of the key insights about finding love. Also, everything I share in this podcast is educational in nature. It’s not medical or psychological advice or treatment for any condition. And if you’re experiencing any serious psychological conditions, please seek professional help. And finally, if you like what you’re learning here, it would be a fabulous gift to subscribe and to leave me a review with your thoughts and reflections. So thank you so much for that. And let’s jump in.

B.A.S.I.C.S.

For me it’s really helpful to have ways to remember the things that matter most because it’s so easy to get distracted by things that don’t matter or things that seductively take me off a path that I’ve decided is probably the wisest path for me. So I decided I wanted to create an acronym for deeper dating, an acronym that I think captures, not all, but, much of the most important points of all for people who want to deepen their sense of self-love and find love because the two are so profoundly connected. The acronym is the word BASICS, and half of the letters in that acronym are things that you can do to help shift and change your own approach to your search for love. And the other half are ways to be discriminating about the people that you choose. To see which kind of attractions might lead to pain and which are much more likely to lead to love. So let’s jump right in and look at these. Okay, so the first letter in the word basics is B. And that stands for bravery. In my intensives, in my classes, in my courses, in my book, so much of the work is internal, the building of a foundation of honoring the parts of ourselves that are the deepest down what I call Core Gifts.

The Process that Leads to Self Love

And that’s a very rich, rich process. One that leads to a lot of self-love, a lot of self-honoring and a real shift. But there comes a time when those beautiful inner processes need help. And the help is the help of bravery and in the search for love, bravery truly, truly is a necessary ingredient. In some ways it’s the yeast that makes the bread rise. So that’s a fabulous question that we can ask ourselves is, am I being brave?

Am I being brave in this search for love?

And what that means is learning new lessons. It means getting out there. It really does mean getting out there. It means being willing to see and face old patterns that didn’t work because we get very patterned in things like the search for love because there’s so much risk inherent in it. So we find safety patterns, but those safety patterns often hold us back from the very thing that we’re seeking. So bravery, the bravery of being on line at Starbucks, as I’ve mentioned before, Arielle Ford says this, and looking up from your phone and seeing that there’s someone you’re attracted to and figuring out a way to maybe start a conversation with them. The bravery of going to events with people who share your values, actual, real, live events. The bravery of diving into online dating period or diving into online dating in new ways. The bravery, the ongoing bravery of revealing who you are. So we don’t get to do this without building the muscle of bravery. So the second letter is the letter A. And that stands for authenticity.

The Power of Authenticity

And my last episode was all about the power of authenticity, how committing to our deepest authenticity is about the greatest act of self-love that we can do. And when that’s combined with saying, “I’m only going to look for people who make that authenticity feel safe.” And we’re going to get to that a little bit later, but when those two things are combined, we have the most powerful and simple path to finding healthy love. So authenticity, which of course is connected to bravery because it is not easy to be authentic. And all the messages that you hear that tell you be authentic, but also fix yourself in this way and fix yourself in that way and act confident and act this way and act that way. It doesn’t really work.

Ultimately, we have to choose the honoring of our authenticity as the primary path we’re taking in our life and in our search for love.

And when we do that, we develop a dignity that is beautiful and impressive, and rare and deeply, deeply attractive to the right people. So all of this process that I teach is based on the magic of authenticity. And I’d want to call it a superpower because in a way it is, but I also don’t like that word superpower because it’s a superpower that is very, very human. It’s the superpower of honoring our vulnerability, and that is a superpower. The third step here, the third key is the letter S. B-A-S, basics. And the letter S stands for what I say is the single most important question in your search for love. And if you make this question your main question, it changes you and it changes your search for love.

Keeping Your Heart Safe

And I truly mean that, and it does it in powerful and beautiful ways. So what is this S? The S stands for safety. And the question is, does my soul feel safe with this person? Now maybe you don’t like the word soul, then you want to say heart, does my heart feel safe with this person? Or maybe you’re saying, “Yes, safety is really nice, but what about sexual attraction and what about location and what about age and what about height?” Et cetera, et cetera. And yes, all of those are real questions, but when they become your first questions, you become more brittle, more anxious, less resonant with your authentic self, and all those questions come and all those questions get answered in time. But when you make your first question, does my soul feel safe with this person? A few things happen; one, there is a core level that you’ve chosen to honor your authenticity and that’s the greatest thing of all. That’s the place to start. The other thing that happens is you activate your sense of discrimination because somebody might be really nice, but that doesn’t mean that they’re really safe. It just means that they’re acting nice potentially. And for most of us, we tend to deactivate a very organic and natural sense of discrimination that we have by thinking, “Oh, I’m being too sensitive. Oh, I’m being too much. Oh, I’m being too judgmental.” We’re going to talk about this more a little bit later. But there are things that we can absolutely be too judgemental about and we’re going to get to that.

Honoring Your Discrimination

It is the last letter in the word basics, but when it comes to a feeling of safety and a feeling of inspiration, that’s where we get to be deeply discriminating. And that’s where we kind of really get to trust our sense of judgment. So, does my soul feel safe with this person? Now you may not know that right away. In some cases you’re going to know it really quickly because they’re going to do something kind of creepy or ugly or unkind. And then you’ll say, “Noted.” And you’ll be aware of that, and you may decide “that’s it, I’m done.” Or you may say, “I’m going to give this person one more chance, but I’m aware of this tendency.” When you honor your discrimination, you notice these things and you take them seriously. So let’s picture this now, think about the last date you went on. And imagine if you were on that date and you asked yourself that question,

Does my soul feel safe with this person?

And that became your paramount kind of question. Re-look at that date and see if you would do the same things, how that would have shifted things for you. And picture doing this as well on future dates, imagine how it would shift things if that was your primary question. And again, sexual attraction will come. That’ll take care of itself. It’s either going to be there, it’s going to be something that you feel like could develop or it’s just not going to be there, and of course you honor that too, but then maybe this person becomes a friend. This is a way to live. It’s not just a way to date.

The Two Circuitries of Attraction

The next question is, it’s the I in the word basics and it stands for inspiration. And I speak a lot about the two different circuitries of attraction we have. We can all be attracted to what I call attractions of deprivation, which is where we feel like the person’s just not really loving us, not really accepting us, not being available over a significant period of time and we try to get them to love us right or treat us right or stop drinking or whatever the thing is. But ultimately there is an embedded quality of deprivation, which we can’t change and which feels like an itch that we have to scratch again and again to finally fix. And we all have that circuitry of attraction. But we have another circuitry of attraction too, which is what I call attractions of inspiration. And that’s when we’re inspired by a person’s treatment of us, treatment of themselves, way they live their life, the way they handle issues of availability and presence and integrity. And that’s what we want because that sets up a whole different wiring. That sets up this gorgeous wiring where goodness and Eros combine. Where a sense of this person’s safety and goodness and also their hotness and sexiness and their sexiness and lust and warmth of your connection all fuse together, and that’s happiness. And you don’t find that without safety and inspiration. So that’s the next question. Am I inspired by this person and who they are in terms of particularly qualities of integrity, decency, goodness, availability, care, generosity, et cetera. There’s a lot more to speak about here, but I just want to say one other thing, these attractions of inspiration often grow more slowly with an attraction of deprivation.

Hook, Line, and Sinker

You are hooked from the beginning in many cases or you’re hooked when all of a sudden the distance shows up or the unavailability shows up. It’s like the hook just gets you.

With attractions of inspiration, that wild hook does not get you.

And the growth of a connection of inspiration happens often more slowly because it’s more organic, it’s more intuitive, and also it happens more slowly because our insides recognize that this could be real. So we don’t latch on or jump on often quite as quickly because we kind of know this is the real deal. And so we enter into it more slowly, and our attraction often grows more slowly. So now we come to the C in the word basics. And the C stands for character. And I’ve said this a number of times before, but I interviewed Hara Marano who was the advice columnist for Psychology Today. And she said,

“There are three things that are the most important things in your choice of a partner. The first is character, the second is character, and the third is character.”

And she is right. She is right. And I want to say something else about this now, which is that niceness is not the same as character because anybody could be super nice to you. They could love bomb you, they could just fill you with niceness, but… And niceness is nice. Three cheers for niceness, but it’s different than character.

And character is what you see when it’s a little difficult to be honest, but the person still is. It’s a little difficult to be kind, but the person still is. It’s a little difficult to be available, but the person still is. Those things are character.

Discrimination Issues

And that’s kind of the solid, solid foundation that you want to build your future on. So that’s another issue is character. And so these, the S, the I, and the C are discrimination issues. Those are things you’re looking for. Does my soul feel safe? Is this an attraction of inspiration? Do I see signs of real character in this person? And if the answers to those are yes, that is truly, truly wonderful. And that brings us to the last letter, which is S which stands for squinting. And it also stands for stretching. So what do I mean by that? Well, let’s stick with stretching. You meet somebody and all of the things that I just described are true, but they’re like five years older or five years younger than you were planning on. Well, if all these other things are true, I really want to encourage you to stretch. When people say to me in my courses and intensives, “I don’t want to date anybody who’s more than 100 miles away because it’s just not conducive to an intimate relationship. What I say to them is if somebody lived 200 miles away, but you knew that they were your soulmate, would you say no to them? I hope the answer is no. I don’t say that last part. I asked them that question and they always say that the answer is no. So that’s where it’s important to stretch because when you start making these choices, you are going to be more likely to meet people who’ve got the S going, got the I going and got the C going in the word basics, but maybe you have to use the letter S and stretch in terms of their height, their distance.

Squinting Your Way to Love

Now obviously if someone’s not right for you, they’re not right for you and you can’t date someone just because they’re good for you. If that kind of chemistry isn’t there, and I’m not suggesting that you do, but if the chemistry is there and if you have to stretch, take the time to get to know the person because what’s going to happen is your chemistry with them and your connection with them is going to grow and that’s going to ultimately overshadow your hesitancy about things like the little age difference, et cetera. So squinting, I’m just going to say something about squinting too. If you’ve ever watched an artist at work painting a subject or drawing a subject, sometimes you notice they squint a little bit and they squint because when you squint, it stops you from getting distracted by the harsh outlines of the subject and you see more into your subject’s essence. I would encourage you in your dating life to squint. If somebody’s wearing shoes or a shirt or whatever that you’re like, “Oh, I don’t like this.” Then you just squint and see who this person is and ask the other questions that we’ve talked about. And this kind of squinting is a really wonderful and important thing when it comes to superficials. I don’t want you to squint when it comes to character or inspiration or safety. But when it comes to choice in music, when it comes to where the person lives, et cetera, et cetera, I do encourage you to squint. So that you could get a sense of who this person really is, what the chemistry feels like between you and you don’t make an evaluation that’s so preemptive that it doesn’t give you the opportunity to do that.

Aligning Yourself to the Path of Love

These six letters of the word BASICS, you can remember really easily; bravery, authenticity, a deep sense of safety, attraction of inspiration, character and stretching or squinting. And when you just click those things off and remember them, you’ll align yourself with the path that’s going to make you feel more peaceful, stronger, and it’s going to help you find the kind of love you’re looking for and heal your life at the same time. So thank you all for listening to this episode, and if you like what you heard, I would so appreciate it if you could subscribe, leave me a review. And you can go to deeperdatingpodcast.com to read the transcript to get your free ebook that teaches the four insights that transform your search for love, or the first two chapters of my bestselling book, Deeper Dating, which teach you how to discover your own core gifts. And I look forward to seeing you on the next episode of Deeper Dating.

We’re taught that the most important key to finding love is to make ourselves more attractive and reveal our authentic self. As seductive as that message sounds, it’s really just self-doubt in a sexy outfit. The path of authenticity strengthens and empowers us–and leads us much more directly to healthy love. Here’s why, and here’s how to embrace this wiser path.

Episode Table of Contents

• The Wrong Path
• The Concept of a Gift Zone
• How Living In Your Authentic Self Leads to Love
• Wild Moment of Prompting
• The Missing Piece

Episode Introduction: Authentic Self

Again and again, we’re told that if we want to find love, we have to fix ourselves, but the truly powerful life-transforming path to finding healthy love is through our authenticity. Learn more in this episode of the Deeper Dating podcast. Hello everybody and welcome to the Deeper Dating podcast. I’m Ken Page, psychotherapist and author of the bestselling book Deeper Dating and today I’m going to talk about the power of authenticity in your search for love. This week and every week I’ll share the greatest tools I know to help you find love and keep it flourishing and heal your life in the process because the skills of dating are nothing more than the skills of love and the skills of love are the greatest skills of all for a happy life. And if you want to learn more about this work, my upcoming intensive and other people’s work that I really respect, just go to deeperdatingpodcast.com.

What Listeners Are Saying

If you sign up for my mailing list, you’ll receive a free ebook of the most powerful tools I know to help everyone in their search for love. You can also find a transcript of this entire episode at deeperdatingpodcast.com. Also, everything I share in this podcast is educational in nature. It’s not medical or psychiatric advice or treatment of any kind. And if you’re experiencing serious psychological conditions, please seek professional help. And if you like what you’re learning here, it would be a wonderful thank you if you subscribed and left me a review. I so appreciate your reviews, so thanks so much for that.

The Wrong Path

Let’s jump in. So much dating advice tells us, in about a million different ways, that we have to fix ourselves or change ourselves in order to find love. The big focus is, if you want to find love, you have to make yourself more attractive. That is this drumbeat, that we hear again and again in a million different ways. This concept of having to fix ourselves and get a little bit thinner, or act a little bit more feminine or a little more masculine, or get a little more confident or flirt better or whatever. Accessorize better, get better glutes, get better abs, whatever. Whatever that is is very seductive because it kind of makes sense on the face of things. Sure, I’ll look better, more people will be interested, I’ll find love, but it doesn’t work that way because something more profound is at work. I mean, if you’re just looking for a date, if you’re looking for sex, if you’re looking being noticed, absolutely, all that stuff works great. But if you’re looking for real love, you’re kind of taking the wrong path. These thoughts about how we should fix ourselves are very, very seductive. Because who wouldn’t want to look thinner, look better, be more confident, be more sexy, whatever the things are? Who wouldn’t want that? But really, as seductive as all of these things are, they are really self-loathing in a very sexy outfit, telling you to come hither. And they’re ultimately not going to lead you to love.

The Path of Authenticity

In fact, the focus on them is going to lead you away from love. So, what leads to love? It is the path of authenticity, for so many different reasons. That’s what we’re going to be talking about today. And my sense is that, by the end of this podcast episode, you will be in touch with the magic of your authenticity, and you, will have a richer sense of why that is going to lead you to healthy love about a thousand times quicker than any of that other advice. I just want to say one thing though, which is, of course it looks good to be in shape. Of course, feeling confident is good, as I said, but the minute those things trump authenticity, you are wounding yourself. Your search for love and your presentation of self is going to feel like you’re climbing up a wobbly ladder because there is no center, there is no solidity, there is no foundation when we do that. So first, there are all of the dating messages that say things like, “You have to be this. You just have to be that. Forget what you feel. This is what you have to act like because it’s going to work.” Those are kind of the more extreme messages and there’s so much of that out there. The mixed messages are more like, “Be confident but be authentic. Act more feminine, act more masculine, but be authentic.” All of these messages are… they’re kind of crazy-making because you can’t be authentic and something other than what you’re feeling and experiencing at the same time.

The Concept of a Gift Zone

Now, I do believe in fake it till you make it for certain situations. Absolutely. So that you can act well and act appropriately. But ultimately, having a fake persona that is supposed to win you love or make you irresistible is just going to kill you. It’s just going to make you lose years of precious time. The beauty of the path of authenticity is it works better. It draws you to people who are healthier. It teaches you the deeper, truer lessons of self-love, and it heals your life at the same time as it leads you to love. Because as I say all the time, and as I said in the intro,

The skills of dating are nothing more than the skills of love.

So, let’s jump in now and talk about how to get to that place of authenticity. I talk a lot about the concept of a gift zone and I’m going to talk about what that is. I actually speak about that in great detail in episode 28, but here’s what I’d like you to do. I’d like you to picture a target, just a typical target shape and it’s got three rings in it. The inside ring is the gift zone. The next ring out is the zone of protection. The third ring out is what I call the zone of disconnection. So here’s the concept, the closer you get into the center, the closer you are getting to your authentic self. This is a map of your zones of intimacy and your zones of authenticity. The further away from that center you get, the more defended you are and the more protected you are.

The First Zone

So that first zone is called the gift zone. What does that mean? That’s when you’re connected to your heart. That’s when you are connected to your feelings, to your humanity. I’m going to talk about this in more detail in a moment or two, but this is the state that we want to hold, and this is the state we’re going to be focusing on in this episode. I’m going to help you learn how to get there and use the magnificent promptings, resources, and magic that exist in that part of you. But the thing about that part of us is, it’s very human, and human isn’t always so easy. We get hurt. The closer we are to the center, the more we can be hurt, the more we can be wounded, the more we can be vulnerable, the more our trust can be betrayed. Especially when we go into the world, taking these precious parts of ourselves and holding them in our hands and saying, “I hope you will accept me.” When instead, we say, “These are my treasures,” and we own that and treasure that. There is a way that we have a backbone. There is a way that we are less fragile, less affected by rejection, and we’ll talk about that more too. But so, there is an innate capacity within this zone of living in your heart, living in your authenticity, that will enable you to be less hurt and bothered less by rejection. But what that takes, is an intention to say, “Baby, I’m honoring my humanity, and I’m only, only, only looking for people who honor it as well.” This is the path of beauty. This is the path to love that I espouse and teach and that this work promotes.

The Zone of Protection

Very vulnerable to be there, for so many different reasons. We protect ourselves from the heat of our core self and we airbrush who we are. We try to be someone who is more acceptable, more desirable, less intense, less sensitive, less different. Or we just kind of want to get away from the intensity of whatever it is we’re feeling in our heart. Because our heart is a powerful instrument of experience. So, we protect ourselves. We protect ourselves with watching TV. We protect ourselves by eating. We protect ourselves with workaholism. I raise my hand for all of those except TV. And we protect ourselves, also, by putting on a false persona, one that we think will be more liked, one that will put us in the limelight maybe a little bit less. We’ll stick out less. We’ll be less noticeably different. We’ll be more socially acceptable. All of those are zones of protection. But as you go out further, you move away from the heated core of your being. You move away from your soul. You move away from your heart. So, just like as you move away from the sun in the solar system, it gets colder, so too, when you move away from the heat of your soul, your heart, you feel colder, your world becomes colder. In that third zone, the zone of disconnection, that coldness becomes dangerous, it becomes toxic. It cuts at the core of our being. The emptiness of that is like, on some level, we’re deprived of oxygen, and that’s a dangerous zone. Most of us have been there at some points in our lives. The task is to, drop by drop, homeopathically, learn to choose to move toward the warmth of the center of that circle.

How Living In Your Authentic Self Leads to Love

There’s so much more here that I talk about in my book, and that I guide people through in my intensives. If you want to learn more about that, just go to deeperdatingpodcast.com. I have an upcoming intensive where people can work very intimately with me over the course of six months, on this very material. But for now, I’m going to talk about why living in our gift zone helps us to find love. Why is this so important for finding love? Once again, to say that in the simplest terms,

Living in your gift zone means living from your heart, living from the truth of what you’re feeling and experiencing.

If you would like help in learning how to access that gift zone, go to episode 28 because I teach practices to help you do that. Well, let me give you some reasons why. You’re going to see, for every single one of these, that doing this will heal your life. And I’m going to explain why doing this will lead you to healthy love, which is a goal of such happiness, such importance, such preciousness. Well, number one is this, when you live from there, you are more magnetic and not this fake, irresistible magnetic. In physics, it’s known that what creates gravity is mass. The more mass an object has, the more gravity it has. Gravity is defined as a force that pulls outside objects to the center of the object that has the gravity. Your mass is your authenticity. When you live from your authenticity, there’s a sense of truth there that is palpable, especially when it’s hard to do or it kind of puts you outside the range of being typical, airbrush normal, for whatever the reason.

Drawing People Near

It’s kind of like bringing you to an edge. People feel it. When you’ve made the choice to love that part of you, people feel it. This is mass. Mass is self in this case. And the more you live in your authenticity, the more mass there will be, the more presence of self, hence the more gravity. That means that you will draw people to you. They will notice you. They will listen to you because man, you are brave and you are from the heart, and people notice that. So, as you live from this place of authenticity, that kind of internal intention to say, “I’m going to be who I am. I’m going to radiate who I am,” makes people notice and creates a sense of gravitas of presence that is natural and true, and hard-earned because you are deciding to be authentic, which is an act of absolute bravery in this world. Next, when you’re in this space of your gift zone, again, where you’re feeling connected to your heart and you could just … Again, I talk about this much more in episode 28. But just take a moment to remember some times in the recent past, when you have lived more from your heart. It may have been a time that you just grabbed someone you loved and hugged them. May have been quiet time alone, where you just kind of felt connected to your core. A recent moment of peace, a moment of revelation, a moment of tears. A time when you felt really inhabiting your own skin, your feet on the ground of your life, just remember that.

Saying What You Mean Without Sounding Mean

A time that you chose to speak the truth of your heart, even though it wasn’t easy. And let me just say, when it comes to speaking the truth of your heart to other people, the basic rule is this, say what you mean, but don’t say it mean. That’s kind of a simple, simple, simple simplification of the rules of healthy feedback. When you’re in a space like that, there’s a way that you’re kind of lit from within by the light of your own heart. You could kind of feel that there might be a magic in this. There’s something in this that radiates out and people feel it. When you’re in this zone, you also get promptings. You’re more likely to feel intuitive promptings of the things you want to do, the places you want to go, the people you feel drawn to, the desires that you have, the things that would make you happy, the ways that you want to give, there’s just a sense of inner prompting that happens from here that is pure gold because that inner prompting is the path of your meaning. That prompting comes from the little bubbles of meaning or the big bubbles of meaning. So, that’s another gift that comes from there, is that you feel the promptings of intuition infinitely more than you do in the other zones. And that intuition, I know for me, has led me much more directly into loving relationships. This is a story that I share, is that when I was in Provincetown – Gay Family Week, there was someone who I was interested in, who became my husband. But he was not really available because he was very involved in being there for his kids. So, I gave up.

Wild Moment of Prompting

It didn’t seem like it was going to happen. I just kind of let it go. At three in the morning, I got woken up bolt upright, and I felt like I got this message. The message was, “Ken, if you want to make this happen, you’ve got to get down to it. You’ve got to do something. You got to be inventive.” So, I was. I figured out this whole ruse, where me and my son would just happen to be where he was passing, and I made a date. Thank God for that wild moment of prompting. But if I wasn’t in a place where I was living more frequently in my gift zone, I wouldn’t have had that prompting and my future would have been different. So, that’s another magic thing that happens when we live in our gift zone. Here’s another. This may be an experience that you have had, and I’d like you to remember. Were you ever in a situation where you were in a conflict, or in a dilemma, or in a difficult situation, and somehow you got in touch with your heart in a different way, and you felt a stream of compassion, either for yourself or for the other person, and that shifted how you handled things? Take a moment to remember if that’s happened for you and how that felt. Gift zone. That’s gift zone. Here is something I want to say about this. Kindness and understanding are two of the biggest aphrodisiacs that exist in your search for love. In fact, the evolutionary psychologist, David Buss, did a very big study of what the single quality that was most important for people who were looking for love was, in a prospective partner.

The Single Greatest Ingredient for Success

Now, this was a study that went across ages, went across genders, went across locations. The number one thing that people chose, male or female, above attractiveness, above success, above a sense of humor, was kindness and compassion. In fact, the research also shows that this is the single greatest ingredient for success in a long-term relationship, is the ability to access that kindness and compassion. So, all this dating advice that’s telling you to do this and this and this and this, instead of telling you to cultivate kindness and compassion and understanding, or to live from the warmth and the heat and the beauty of your humanity and your authenticity, is steering you mostly wrong. So in the gift zone, you feel this kind of … you get these moments where compassion or kindness hits you because you’re close to your heart and your heart is going to feel those things. This changes our future. Those crossroads, where we choose kindness and compassion, where we might’ve chosen something else, literally craft a new future for us. So, this is precious stuff folks. Here’s another thing. When we’re in our gift zone, we are more porous to inspiration. When we’re busy, when we’re protected, when we’re not connected to our gift zone, we’re like a smooth surface. Stuff bounces off of us. We don’t notice it. When we enter into our gift zone, we become less of a nonstick surface. We become more porous, and we become more porous to the breezes of inspiration or insight that kind of pass-through our being, as a matter of course, when we’re living in our gift zone.

Moments of Inspiration

Those moments of inspiration, take a moment to think about that time you were walking on the beach, time you were … whatever it is you were doing, where you kind of felt a breeze of inspiration, that gave you a new idea or a new direction or a new sense of understanding. Remember how that felt. You can see why this is such precious stuff. And hopefully you can see why this will not only enrich, deepen, beautify, and heal your life, but it will lead you to love. I guess I do need to say something more about that. When you don’t live in this way, you are making a statement about not trusting your soul. It is not just an act of avoidance. It is an act of quiet violence against your being, and it creates a vacuum where yourself and your heart should be, and nature abhors a vacuum. That vacuum will be filled with masochistic situations and relationships. That’s the kind of deeper blueprint of this intimacy journey. Which brings me to my last point. The more you live in your gift zone, the richer and more filled with meaning your entire life will become. The more fun, the richer, the more filled with, I guess not just meaning, but beauty, significance, connection, all of those good things. The more your whole life will be filled with those things. Here’s the other piece though, and this is what is not taught in dating advice.

The Missing Piece

The more you share your gift zone, not just in that wonderful relationship once you find it, but right now in your dating life. The more you do your dating life from your gift zone, knowing clearly that you’re going to be discriminating, you are only, only, only, only, only going to choose those people with whom your soul feels safe as you do this. So here’s the other piece of this that’s huge, and this is something we don’t get taught. This is also the great and beautiful and most powerful kind of bullet train to finding healthy love. The more you share your gift zone, the more you share these parts of you that we’re talking about, in your search for love, the quicker you are going to find and the more powerfully you are going to draw healthy, beautiful love. This is really, really true. We’re taught to do a million exterior things to find love. Try this and watch what happens. The other powerful thing is, that when you decide to do this when you make it your choice to take the risk of living from your heart, your tenderness, your vulnerability, your passion in your dating life, there’s an act of dignity in that. Somewhere inside you’re saying,

I know this is risky. I know not everybody does this, but I choose to because this is who I am. This is what I love. This is what I believe in.

There is a dignity and that dignity is true confidence. It’s a humankind of confidence. It’s not unshatterable. It’s not made of steel, but it’s real.

The Deeper Physics of Wiser Dating

When you have that dignity, your ability to discriminate the people with whom, when you show this part of yourself, step on it, don’t appreciate it, ignore it, you will easily lose your taste for people like that. You know this was a hard-earned choice and you’re not going to squander it. You will notice, and you will magnetize people who treasure those parts of you and want to be that same kind of person too. This is the truth. This is the deeper physics of wiser dating. Try these ideas because not only will your life become richer, not only will your whole life begin to shine more but you will move much more quickly to the love you dream of. I know this to be true. If you want to learn more about this approach, you can go to deeperdatingpodcast.com. Learn about how to work with me, learn about my book, find out about all the different episodes where I speak about these things. Thank you all for taking this journey with me today. It was a joy to get to share this material with you. If you like what you heard, it would be a wonderful gift if you could subscribe and leave me a review. I value those so much. I look forward to seeing you on the next episode of The Deeper Dating Podcast. Take good care.

You’re thinking whether to get back with your ex. How do you decide if that’s a good idea or a really bad one? And how do you give your reconciliation the best possible chance of really making it this time? Join me to learn more.

Episode Table of Contents

• A Journey of Rupture and Repair
• The Place Where Mature Love Is Born
• Validating the Treasures of Who You Are
• The Foundational Pieces

Episode Introduction: Get Back With Your Ex

My ex and I are considering getting back together. Is it a good idea or is it a bad idea? And if we do it, what are the steps we should take? Stay tuned to the Deeper Dating podcast to learn when it’s a good idea to get back together, when it’s not a good idea, and how to give your reconciliation the best chance possible for surviving. Hello and welcome to the Deeper Dating Podcast. I’m Ken Page and today we’re going to talk about a huge and important topic: reconciliation. Every week I’m going to share with you the greatest tools I know to help you find love and keep it flourishing and to heal your life in the process because the skills of dating are nothing more than the skills of love and the skills of love are the greatest skills of all for a happy life.

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts and Leave Ken a Review

If you want to learn more about the Deeper Dating approach, my upcoming intensive and the work that I do, you can just go to DeeperDatingPodcast.com and there you’ll get a free gift of the first two chapters of my best selling book, Deeper Dating: How to Drop the Games of Seduction and Discover the Power of Intimacy. And in those two chapters you will learn the skills you need to discover your own intimacy core gifts and there at that website, you can also get a transcript of this whole episode. I also just want to say that everything I share in this podcast is educational in nature. It’s not medical or psychiatric advice or treatment. And if you’re experiencing any serious psychological conditions, please seek professional help. And finally, if you like what you’re hearing here, I’d love it if you could leave me a review and subscribe on Apple Podcast or elsewhere. So, thank you so much for that.

A Journey of Rupture and Repair

Something that so many of us have wondered about is should I get back with my ex? And it’s a huge question and there’s a lot to it and that’s what we’re going to focus on today, just some kind of rich reflections and suggestions about that subject. So I want to start out by saying love is a journey of rupture and repair, again and again. Minor ruptures, major ruptures and then repair. And that’s how love works. So love is a wonderful thing and God knows repairing a broken or wounded or lost love can also be a really wonderful thing. And life is really all about trying again and so is love. So I just want to acknowledge that going back is a brave act. It’s hopeful, it’s inspiring, and in many cases it can really be worth the effort.

And it takes a special person to say, “I’ve made mistakes. You’ve made mistakes. This love has been precious and in reflection, remains precious. And I’m open to doing the work to try to do it better this time.” And it takes a special love to make it feel like that’s worth it.

So I want to start out by saying these things. I want to acknowledge the act of bravery and goodness and the kind of ongoing journey of repair that’s just part of love. But I also want to say, as we know, that going back in for more of the same is not a good thing. And we all at the time that we consider going back with an ex, there’s a hope for a new beginning, but there’s a fear of just a painful replay of what happened before.

When NOT to Get Back with An Ex

So there are two very reasonable assumptions we can make here. And those are that what you loved in the other person and what you loved in your relationship and what you loved in yourself in the relationship are all still there and what you didn’t love in your partner and in yourself and in the relationship is also still going to be there. And so, this is an opportunity for healing, but going in and imagining that things will just be different now is almost never a good idea. So I want to start by talking about when not to get back with an ex, or at least not to get back at this point with an ex. And then, if these cases don’t apply to you or if you feel like you want to do it anyway, then what are the steps that you can take to give this new-old relationship the best chance possible to really make it this time? Okay. So, first I’m going to talk about the reasons why it would be best in my opinion, not to go back at least now. The first is are there any active significant addictions? I’m not necessarily talking about addictions like food addictions or addictions like that. I’m talking about significant addictions that are really harmful and dangerous – substance abuse, addictions, gambling addictions, addictions like that. Not that food addictions cannot be really harmful, but I’m just specifying addictions that are really, really damaging. And in my opinion, chemical dependency, alcoholism, gambling, these are some addictions, sex addictions, these are really serious addictions that can damage a relationship. And I would say that if there are active addictions, and I want to say either on your partner’s part or on your part, don’t go back now.

The Period of Extended Sobriety

Wait until your partner or you or both of you have reached a period where you can hold a period of extended sobriety and that you have ample support because otherwise, you will not have the control to have things not spiral down in the way they did before. You just won’t have that control. That’s just my opinion, but it’s also my firm belief and it’s what I’ve seen from decades of work as a psychotherapist. Next, are there, on the part of you or your partner, any untreated, undertreated or unstabilized serious psychiatric disorders? I’m not talking about some degree of depression or some degree of anxiety. I’m talking about serious psychiatric disorders that are not stabilized. If that’s the case, give your relationship the best leg up chance it has. Don’t go back unless, and until, that condition is properly managed with ample support, once again. So those are two places where I would say don’t go back until this is addressed. Here’s a third one. Has there been abuse? Now, if there has been serious abuse in my opinion, just don’t go back, period. If the abuse has been less intense and if you have really strong reason to believe that it won’t happen again, still don’t consider going back without the support of a good and skilled couples therapist, not waiting in the wings but helping you both begin to make choices about your future. And this would be a couples therapist with strong expertise in the field of abuse. So I know I’m starting out a little heavy-handed with this, but I think these things are so important. All of the things that I just mentioned.

The Place Where Mature Love Is Born

Now, if none of these is the case and you’re still kind of thinking I want to maybe give this a try, I just want to share some reflection points, some questions, some things to think about for you and your ex to think about on your own, for your ex to think about on his or her own or their own and for the two of you to talk about together. So Harville Hendrix , the brilliant couples theoretician once said that,

“In all relationships there comes a point that the thing you most need from your partner is the thing that your partner is least able to give you. And that’s the point that a lot of relationships dissolve.”

But what Hendrix says is that’s the place where mature love is born. That’s not the end of the relationship necessarily; that can be the beginning of a deeper bond because this is where you and your partner have to learn each other’s deeper emotional language. And the thing that you most need from your partner is actually, the thing that they most need from you, is probably the thing that each of you needs in the deepest way to become the person that you’re meant to be. They’re seeing something in you and you’re seeing something in them that’s a way in which they need to grow.

Building a Solid Foundation For Your New home

So if each of you is willing to say, I’m going to commit to try to grow in that way. And if each of you was willing to listen to the wisdom of the other person’s needs, start out with a plan about how this time around, you’re going to begin to develop a shared language around the pain that happens for each of you when these needs are not met, and around how to meet those needs, and around the kind of support you would need to make that happen. And going into a relationship with a beginning of a new shared language about that brings hope, brings stability and it brings a kind of amazing ability of intimacy maturity that goes a really long way in a new relationship. So next, if you go back, assume that the same problems will all happen again, or most of them will. Start from there. Start from the assumption that the wonderful things will probably happen again and the problems will happen again and expect that, expect that. And this time, be ready to struggle to do what you couldn’t do last time, to give what you couldn’t give last time, or wouldn’t give, and to get the help that you may not have gotten last time. Because if you choose to reconcile, you’re going to have to make the choice not to do many of the mistakes that you made the last time. And what I want to say about that is it’s really, really important to have a therapist at the very least waiting in the wings. Maybe the two of you start with a therapist beforehand to just talk this stuff through. But the more that you get a sense that you’re not doing this impulsively, the more sense you will have that you will be building a solid foundation for your new home.

Crossing the Bridge

Now, if your partner, or you, or both of you are not willing to do that, that’s a warning sign. That’s a sign that things probably will go back to the same places they were before. And the other piece is that you’re now entering into this relationship with some scar tissue because you have both been hurt in the past and so it’s easy to say, “there’s baggage here” and it’s easy to say “I’m not going to be vulnerable in the same way.” But we need to be able to be vulnerable, we need to know that there’s a shared language. A bridge that is being built by the two of you from each side of the chasm that’s separated you to try to meet in the middle. And that goes a really long way. And there’s a series of great questions to ask here. And I know this is a lot of work folks, but hey, this is going to be your future. It’s worth every drop of this work. So it’s good to ask what made you, and to talk about what made you break up in the first place and if each of you owned your part in that? Essential, essential. And what support are each of you going to get to change those patterns? What support are you getting, have you gotten, and will you get? Allow yourselves the opportunity for a lot of hard, honest conversations. Because if not, you can expect more of the same, even if your external circumstances are better now because the negative kind of ingrained patterns that you’ve both hardwired into your connection are sure to come back in force even if life seems easier now. So while you’ve got hope and motivation, create a game plan for what to do when the old problems arise.

Validating the Treasures of Who You Are

And here’s a deep one folks. This is a question that I teach in my work, is kind of probably the most important and profound question that we can ask and that is, does my soul feel safe with this person? Does my deep heart feel safe with this person? Not safe that they’re going to be perfect but safe that they’re going to try to own their own stuff, safe that they’re willing to do the work and not run and not flee. And you don’t want to go back until your sense of safety is solid enough and deep enough. Both of you are probably going to be kind of gun shy too because you both have been hurt and because the relationship ended. This is a time to give gentleness, to give kindness, to give compassion, to give compliments, to give appreciation, to give yourself – sexually, emotionally, romantically you when you’re ready, when you’re ready to do that, but to give your deep heart and your vulnerability when and if you think this is a good way to go. Share with your partner your regret and how you might have hurt them. Share with your partner what you find sexy about them, what you find kind and beautiful and wonderful about them. Validate all of the treasures of who they are. That’s going to make a real difference. That’s something that we don’t do enough of in our relationships. And if it’s difficult to do that verbally, write them a card. Acknowledge all the things you adore about them because there’s got to be something really special here to make you consider going back. That’s worth honoring.

Circuitries of Attractions of Deprivation

Now again, if you’re not at the point that you’re sure you want to do this, that kind of response might be premature but those pieces that seem worth doing no matter what, whether you get back together with them or not, and those pieces that seem like they would be helpful if you do decide to get back together, don’t skimp on those. Don’t assume that you’re going to coast on old good feelings or even the resurgence of new good feelings. Share all of those parts. It makes such a huge difference. And that’s for everybody, folks. That’s for all of us in all of our intimate relationships. It’s magic to share those things with people. In my book, Deeper Dating and in the podcast and in all of my classes and intensives, I talk about the difference between two circuitries of attraction that we all have. Attractions of inspiration and attractions of deprivation. Attractions of inspiration are the ones where your love and your desire is fueled by the ways in which your partner inspires you with his or her goodness or their goodness with the way they try to live in the world with the way they behave, with the way they treat you. That circuitry of attraction is the kind that can last. It’s the only kind that’s worth going back to. Now, there are circuitries of attractions of deprivation as well, and those are fueled by that scratch, the itch, agonizing need to finally get your partner to love you fully or treat you well and those attractions of deprivation mimic real love and they create a relentless need inside us, but they’re not the kind of love that brings a future of joy.

The Wave

Of course, all relationships have both aspects, but if you’re considering going back, ask yourself is this essentially an attraction of inspiration? And if not, reconciliation is probably not the best idea. And here’s the last point that I want to share. It’s a really, really rich one. Often, we flee spouses or partners who are good and decent and kind and available, these attractions of inspiration. We feel bored, we lose desire, we get super judgmental and often that is because deep down, we’re frightened of real love. It’s a phenomenon I call “The Wave” and I speak about that in my podcast as well and in my opinion, it is one of the greatest saboteurs of potentially good relationships. Usually, the wave occurs before marriage because it’s fueled by fear of intimacy, but it could be triggered by trauma and also by new challenges. For example, you’re going to buy a house together, you’re going to take the leap of getting married, you’re going to have children together and all of a sudden you get cold feet, fear hits you, and then all of a sudden your partner just seems a little bit less sexy or a little bit less desirable or their irksome qualities just get more irksome or all of a sudden, you want to be starting to have sex with other people. And these are things that happen when we really meet the next level of availability in a partner or the next level of commitment. I know for me that in my marriage before we got married when we hit those levels of new things, I always got afraid. I always wanted to run.

The Foundational Pieces

But thank God I know that that’s something that happens for me. But if I wouldn’t have known that, I would have fled and at a later point I might’ve thought of that person as the one that got away or the one that I let getaway or the relationship that I was just not mature enough to have. So, I do encourage you if you relate to that, to listen to my podcast where I speak about that in more detail in episodes 21, 22, and 23 where I talk about healing your fear of intimacy. So the ground of your new future with this partner should you decide to proceed is going to be built right here and right now, in the kindness you show each other, in the care you show each other, in the integrity of owning what’s yours and asking for what you need, learning the skills of how to share what your needs are, what your hurts are, and to listen to your partners. Someone once said to me, he said,

“When we stand in front of each other, my right is always going to be your left.”

And I love that. And I think it’s so true because we’ll always see things from our side, that act of saying two things.

Claiming That Second Best Chance

I’m going to take the time to listen to your side and take it in and listen to that map that you have of the world. Because it’s going to be different than my map, but I’m going to take it in and I’m going to honor it and I’m going to validate it and then also saying, I am going to commit that whatever it takes, I’m here to do it. This time, I’m not going to leave. This time, let’s not leave; let’s really try this. If you’re not ready to say that yet, because maybe you’re going to kind of start and see how things go. Absolutely, that makes perfect sense too. But do it with all of these foundational pieces in place because you’ll feel better about yourself and you’ll give this relationship a much greater chance for success. So good luck because what you’re doing is brave and exciting and powerful and you want to give it the best chance it can possibly have. So thanks so much for listening. If you liked this episode or any of my episodes, please feel free to subscribe on Apple Podcast and I’d love it if you could leave me a review and I look forward to seeing you next week on the Deeper Dating Podcast.

Why should we have a soft heart in the tough world of dating? Because when we do, we open ourselves to deeper streams of inner wisdom. We choose better partners. And we literally change the course of our future. In this episode, you’ll learn wonderful tools to help you achieve all the above.

Episode Table of Contents

• A Wisdom Journey
• Byproducts of Disintegration
• How Do You Deal With Self Disintegration
• Empathic Connection Versus Empathic Failure

Episode Introduction: Soft Heart

When you’re stuck, when you’re frozen inside, when you’re angry, when you’re upset, when you’re not connected to your heart, what causes that and what can you do to soften your heart in a world that is so often cold and harsh, because in having a soft heart, you change the course of your future. Stay tuned to the Deeper Dating Podcast to learn more. Hi, everybody, and welcome to the Deeper Dating Podcast. I’m Ken Page, and today, we’re going to be talking about how we can soften our hearts in the tough world of dating and the difficulties of intimacy and life. This is a big, big thing, because when we can soften our hearts, we’re open to streams of wisdom, and new insights, and new ways around difficult situations, and empathy, and richer and deeper life in any avenue of our existence. This is a huge thing when we can soften our hearts, because our worldview shifts in ways that end up being really positive. So I’m going to talk about that today and teach you some wonderful techniques and some great insights about that. I’m a psychotherapist, and I’m the author of the bestselling book, Deeper Dating: How to Drop the Games of Seduction and Discover the Power of Intimacy.

Subscribe on Apple Podcasts and Leave Ken a Review

Every week, I’m going to share with you the greatest tools and pieces of insight that I know to help you find love in your life, and then keep it flourishing, and to heal your life in the process, because really, the skills of dating are nothing more than the skills of love, and the skills of love are the most important skills of all for a happy life. If you want to learn more about the Deeper Dating approach and hear about an upcoming intensive that I’m going to be offering, just go to deeperdatingpodcast.com, and click Work With Ken, or join my mailing list where you’ll get the first two chapters of my book, which will teach you how to discover your own core intimacy gifts. Remember that everything I share in this podcast is educational in nature. It’s not psychiatric advice or psychological advice or treatment, and if you’re experiencing any serious psychological conditions, please do seek professional help. Finally, if you like what you’re learning here, I would love it if you subscribe to me in Apple Podcast or elsewhere, and left me a review, so thank you so much for that.

A Wisdom Journey

Okay. This is a really, really wonderful topic because I think that in the intimacy journey and the essence of this message kind of is based on the concept that your intimacy journey, your search for love is not just a goal-oriented, “I got to get that thing.” It’s a journey of wisdom, and every step, every new wisdom insight you have and you live, moves you closer both to the love that you’re looking for and to a life that’s richer with love. This is a wisdom journey, and that’s a great thing, and it yields results in your search for love, I promise you that. Paramahansa Yogananda, who was a spiritual teacher, who’s, I think one of the first spiritual teachers who came to the United States for a very, very long period of time, and is my spiritual teacher since I was 17, which is a really, really long time ago, he said at one point that …

“The human heart easily becomes hardened, that it becomes flinty, and we need processes so that we could kind of dig through that flint and soften our hearts so that love can percolate through it again.”

This, I think is a given, is that our hearts become flinty quickly and easily, and all of us need to find ways to understand, “How do we get flinty in our hearts, what does that look like, how does it affect our lives, and what can we do to heal that?” We’ve got super, super exciting insights about that that we’re going to be talking about. Let’s just start though with why it’s important to soften our heart, and what happens when we do.

Survival Behavior

One thing that happens is that when our hearts harden, they do that out of fear and a survival need. When that happens, we go into survival behaviors. Survival behaviors are super helpful for getting us out of serious danger. They work, they’re important, but they’re not good for more nuanced interactions with our lives, with the people we love, or with ourselves, so what we do is we get into kind of really hardened ways. We’re going to talk about what those are, but we get into really hardened ways of interacting with the world that push love away. If you listened to two episodes ago, there was a wonderful study done that said the single greatest characteristic for having a happy and rich life is the development of a coping style that doesn’t push love away, and that’s huge. When our hearts are hardened, when they’re flinty, we push love away, even though that’s not our goal. That’s not our goal at all. Our goal is to find love and to protect ourselves, but we do it in reactive ways. When we can step back and soften our hearts, and I’m going to get into how we do that, when we kind of step back and do that, amazing things happen. One thing that happens is breezes can flow in our mind and our hearts. Breezes are like little bits of insight, little bits of compassion, little ways out that we never, ever would have noticed or figured out previously, remorse for ways that we’ve hurt people, care, love, treasuring. So many different things happen when we’re at a crossroads where previously, we would have just hardened our heart and enacted in old ways, we can somehow find a way to soften our heart.

Softening of Hearts

Magic happens, our world opens, and we get wiser in love, and the amazing thing is, that wisdom generalizes those lessons that we learn when we’re about to go right, and we stop and soften our hearts and don’t go right, but go in another direction. Those lessons stay with us. They really do, and they’re hard-earned wisdom, and they’re gold, and they come in handy when we find our partner. They come in handy to find our partner. These are some of the things that happen when our hearts soften. Now, I want to talk about a concept here that is very powerful, very useful. In self-psychology, which is a school of psychology, there’s a concept called byproducts of disintegration. Disintegration is like when we feel screwed up, when we are in pain, when we get blocked, when our triggers are triggered. We kind of have what’s called a disintegration. In other words, we’re not kind of one with ourselves. We’re not flowing smoothly. There’s a kind of fragmenting of self that happens, and I’m not talking about serious psychopathology here. I’m talking about day-to-day life, the little things that hurt our hearts that trip us up, or the bigger things that do that, or the memories of things that do that. When that happens, we go into our hardened heart space, our defensive space. When we do that, we experience what self-psychology calls byproducts of that disintegration, and those are the ways that we behave that push love away, that push love of ourselves and other people away, because we’re triggered and reactive. All of us have different byproducts of disintegration, and it’s a hugely important thing to begin to know, “What are your byproducts of disintegration? How do you get when you get triggered?”

Byproducts of Disintegration

One way to know that really easily is to just think about what the people who love you have told you for a really long time now about what bothers them when you behave in a certain way, that might be uncompassionate, or unkind, or harsh, or disconnected. It’s not too hard to find out our byproducts of disintegration because our loved ones can tell us. My teenage son has given me the gift of telling me about a million times in a million ways what he sees as my byproducts of disintegration. He describes them as a kind of harshness. He says, “You’re a softy, but you’re a harsh softy.” He calls me the harsh softy sometimes, and he’s right. He’s right. That harshness that happens when I feel impatient, that’s another one, pushes him away, pushes away the people I love when I get stressed when I get impatient. For me, another byproduct of disintegration is rushing. Another one is perfectionism and judgmentalness. These are some of my byproducts of disintegration. Another one is just a kind of chronic stress state, a state that lacks compassion, and just wants to push through, drive through, get through, get it done, make the world change around me, make me change. It’s harsh. These are some of my byproducts of disintegration, and I’ll share a story. My son was maybe like eight years old at some point, and I was in my byproducts of disintegration, and that was manifesting as being too busy and rushing. I went into the living room, and he had taken our sofa and filled it with pillows and blankets, and he just looked at me. He said, “Dad, rest. Just come and rest.” He had made this nest for me.

Moments of Disintegration

It was so beautiful. I won’t forget it. That was a very compassionate way for him to point out that I could stop with my byproducts of disintegration. What triggers yours? What are yours? What triggers them? These are rich and glorious questions because the more conversant you get with what your byproducts of disintegration are, the more you’ll love yourself because you get it. You get it. There’s this thing that you do. The more you’ll give yourself a break, the more there will be language for something that may be previously you didn’t want to face, or you beat yourself up for, or you just didn’t want to be true. Yeah. These are my byproducts of disintegration. In a relationship, those times that you might feel like, “Oh gosh, I need a drink,” those are moments where disintegration is happening, moments when you just want to go to your phone right away for some more dopamine. There’s disintegration happening. Whatever your ways, your patterns are, when that happens, you could say, “Something’s shaking me up here. Something is making me disintegrate.” Now, this is not, once again psychopathological, a disintegration of self. It’s just more that experience of not being as integrated, being kind of somewhat fragmented. When we know this, we become wiser. We become more patient with ourselves. We get a little bit more of a sense of humor about this, and more we face the actual landscape of our intimacy journey. We don’t run from it. We face it and we say, “Okay.” That’s a kind of mastery that is beautiful, hard-won, and is deep maturity, and one of the profound skills of developing a coping style that doesn’t push love away.

Self-Psychology: Identifying the Triggers

“Oh, yeah. I feel that happening to me. I feel my byproducts happening, and I know that. I understand that.” In my courses, and classes, and intensives, and I have an intensive coming up soon for people that want to do the really deep work over an extended period of time, six months to really find healthy love. And you can learn more about that by going to deeperdatingpodcast.com, and just clicking on Work With Ken. In that intensive, I get to work with people so that they can see what the coping styles are that they have that push love away, and begin to actually change them. That’s again hard-won, gorgeous, lifelong wisdom. Let’s talk now about how we can change them. One way we’re going to think about this and understand it is by going back to self-psychology, and self psychology’s explanation of what triggers this disintegration, and these byproducts or products of disintegration. What self-psychology teaches is that what triggers those originally, the original cause was an empathic failure on the part of our parents. Meaning, we were whoever we were being at that moment, and it was met with something that felt like a violation of ourselves. Maybe something really like we go to a parent with a piece of art or a piece of writing that we did that we just think is so wonderful, and they’re like, “Oh, yeah. Put it up on the fridge,” and so then, “Oh, they missed my soul,” or maybe it’s something harsher or more intense, or maybe we have a fierce love of truth, and we express that in our family and get nailed for it, or we have a deep degree of tenderness, and it’s not seen or met.

Reasons Why We Disintegrate

We disintegrate because as young ones, this empathic failure makes us feel like there’s no ground under my feet for me to be me in a good way in the world, and there’s a disintegration of self because the parts of us that are not mirrored in healthy ways are weak and vulnerable. I just have to digress here to say something really amazing. Ashley Montagu in his book that was called Touching, talked about, I think it was sheep where… Don’t quote me on that part, but where the mother sheep, when the baby is born, needs to lick the baby all over its body, including over its internal organs. If there’s an internal organ that the mother does not lick over, that internal organ is more likely to be weak, and wounded, and get sickly throughout the entire course of that animal’s life, because that internal organ was never awakened, never awakened by being profoundly mirrored, seen, and loved. These are the places that that internal organ will experience disintegration, and be more prone to problems throughout the animal’s life. That’s just a rich kind of capturing of what this empathic failure can do to us. What’s the antidote? Well, the antidote is to create empathy where there was previously not enough empathy. This is super exciting and wonderful stuff because our world changes.

Our hearts heal. Love opens up all of these, and our life becomes richer.

Also, we find that we have access to a stream of this kind of love-wisdom mixture that is like nectar. It’s a big deal. It’s glorious. It gets us through a lot of problems, and it brings us a lot of joy. Again, it’s hard won, and it’s one of the lessons of life.

How Do You Deal With Self Disintegration

What we’re going to talk about now is what to do when you experience this disintegration that arises from an empathic failure towards yourself, or from you toward yourself and/or other people toward you. First, I want to talk about forgiveness, but not in the way you think I’m going to talk about forgiveness or you might think I’m going to talk about forgiveness. We cannot leapfrog into forgiveness.

Forgiveness is not an obligation. It’s a gift we give ourselves, and it’s a gift we give someone else, but we cannot give it until we’re ready to give it.

The first step I feel in a really organic forgiving process is first, to honor our pain. When there’s injustice to honor the injustice, not to leapfrog over that. In an incredible song called " target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer external" data-wpel-link="external">Mother, John Lennon, he did this album after he went through primal therapy, and he had this great, great line. He said,

“Children, don’t do what I have done. I couldn’t walk, and I tried to run.”

When we are not ready for forgiveness and we try to force it on ourselves, that’s exactly what that is. I feel the first step, and I speak about this in a lot more detail in my book, Deeper Dating, but I feel that the first step needs to be an honoring of the injustice that occurred and the pain that it caused us. There has to be an acknowledgement. We cannot start with, “I’m being too sensitive.” We cannot start with, “I’m wrong to think this way.” We need to start with an honoring of, “What felt wrong?” Now, where we kind of often go off course is in the assumptions we made about why that happened, what it meant?

AHA Process

What it meant about us personally, but our gut-level sense that something was wrong needs to be honored as a first step. This is a process I call in my book the “AHA process”, which begins with awareness, and the second stage, which is just everything to get to the third stage, but the second stage is honoring, honoring of what didn’t feel right of our sensitivity, of our discrimination. Then, of course, honoring of the other person too, but starting with honoring of our discrimination. God, that makes it so much easier, but it’s a big step validating the exquisiteness of our sensitivities. Then, the third step is action that must spring out of that initial honoring. Okay. That’s one thing I want to say about forgiveness. I want to say some other things too. One thing that for me works, and I do this regularly because my heart hardens regularly and gets flinty regularly, just like I need to do stretching, because my fascia and my muscles tighten up pretty easily, so I need to build that into my life. I need to build something in that reminds me of my humanity, and I actually need to do it a lot. Apart from my meditation practice, which I’ve done for a really, really, really long time now, and I love and I treasure, and I really believe in, is a technique called tapping or EFT, Emotional Freedom Technique, which is a technique that has been clinically proven. There are about 100 research studies out there, and if you join my mailing list, I’m actually going to be sending out a recording that teaches you how to tap and guides you in a tapping meditation around your intimacy journey.

The Tapping Technique

That’ll be coming soon if you join my mailing list, but I love tapping. There have been about 100 studies of it, clinical studies, and what it does, one thing that it does is dramatically reduce the cortisol levels in your brain, and cortisol is the stress hormone. When those levels go down, it’s also a softening of our terror impulse, our fear impulse, our stress impulse, and our heart, hence, softens. I do this regularly during the day, just for five minutes every… I’m actually now trying to do it for five minutes every two hours. I’m not succeeding that that well, but I’m getting there, and it helps immensely for me not to act like the harsh softy, and for me, not to live so much more time in my byproducts of disintegration. I love this tapping technique, taking a walk, exercising, whatever it is, but I find that a decentering from my stress and whatever the kind of white-knuckled rigidity patterns that I’m locked into, anything that helps me soften around that allows the winds of wisdom and compassion to begin to come in. Remember, that empathic failure is the cause of this kind of hardening of heart, so the more we can just kind of rest and find empathy again, find empathy for the world, find empathy for ourselves, remember our softness, remember our humanity. Whatever helps us do that, brings back the empathy, which heals and stops and interrupts this other unhealthy process, these mechanisms that push love away.

Anything that gives space really helps.

Now, I want to talk about the last thing that I think really helps. Here’s what it is.

Reach Out for Help

If you are upset about something, and you try to make yourself feel better through any of those techniques, or the technique which just never works of, “Get over it,” or, “You’re being too sensitive,” I don’t know, maybe that works for some people. I don’t think it ever works for me, but whatever it is that you try, including all of these previous techniques, if they don’t work after a couple times, here’s what I suggest, give up trying and speak to another human being. Get help and get support. I can pretty much promise you that if you find a compassionate, wise person, you will skyrocket in terms of your release from whatever your patterns are, these byproducts of disintegration. Talking to someone, if you want to talk to the person who you feel hurt with and you feel that they’re decent and kind, and they’re not going to be out to hurt you, because if they are, if they’re not safe, that’s something else. If you can talk to them and share what’s in your heart using the techniques, which we can talk about another time of non-violent communication, basically “I statements”, not globalizing, not attacking, saying what you feel, what you need, turning your anger into an ask, all of these kind of processes. If you can do that with the person and have them hear you, and then you hear them, well, the healing is amazing, and often, 5,000 times faster than trying to meditate your way out of it, and I’m a meditator. Or speak to someone else who you know and love. I can pretty much guarantee you, if you’re in a stuck place speaking to someone who loves you and who has wisdom, will cut your recovery time by 90%, 80%.

Empathic Connection Versus Empathic Failure

If you try and try and you can’t change something, give up and go for help, because we are interdependent beings. Just the quality of empathic connection will soothe and heal the byproducts of earlier empathic failure, including empathic failure to yourself.

When that happens and the heart softens, the winds of inspiration come.

And when the winds of inspiration come, baby, that is wonderful. We feel who we are. We get glimpses of love. We get glimpses of little ways out that can lead to big ways out. We feel our heart, we feel love, we are kinder, we are more generous. All these wonderful things happen if we can interrupt that disintegration cycle and bring in a real empathy, an empathy toward ourselves and an empathy to us from other people. I just think these are rich, rich techniques, and I encourage you to take on whatever techniques work for you, but I also truly encourage you to find a self-soothing technique that softens the hardening of your heart that you can do on your own. For me, it’s meditation. For me, it’s tapping. Other spiritual practices too, but again, for me, tapping is one that I really love. In a future episode, I’m going to be interviewing Dawson Church, who’s kind of an amazing guy and very wonderful person, and perhaps the top scientist studying EFT in the world.

Share Your Thoughts

If you liked this episode, please subscribe on Apple Podcast or elsewhere. Please leave me a review. That would be wonderful. If you’re interested in learning more about this work or my upcoming intensive, go to deeperdatingpodcast.com. Sign up for my mailing list and click the Work With Ken button. Thank you all and have a wonderful week, and I’ll see you on the next episode of the Deeper Dating Podcast.

Dating is hard. And dating culture..oh boy. How about let’s start with unkind, demoralizing and frustrating? It’s easy to see why our protections and defenses are up when we get out there. BUT: those very protections block us from showing our authentic heart, the key to finding healthy love. In this episode, you’ll learn how to date in a way that leads you to the person who is right for you and to a healthy, beautiful sustainable love: the kind you’re really looking for.

Episode Table of Contents

• The Dating Shift
• Sculpting Fears
• Stretching Out of Fear
• Where Is The Person Who Is Right For You

Episode Introduction: Person Who Is Right for You

So you’re at the point that you’re really ready to find sustainable, real love. What are the shifts that you need to make right now to help you meet the person who is right for you? Stay tuned to the Deeper Dating Podcast to learn more. Hello and welcome to the Deeper Dating Podcast. I’m Ken Page. I’m a psychotherapist, a coach, and the author of the bestselling book, Deeper Dating, How to Drop the Games of Seduction and Discover the Power of Intimacy. Every week, I’m going to share with you the greatest tools I know to help you find love, keep it flourishing, and heal your life in the process, because the skills of dating are nothing more than the skills of love, and the skills of love are the greatest skills of all for a happy life. Today, I’m going to be speaking about how to meet someone who is truly good for you.

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If you want to learn more about the Deeper Dating approach, please go to DeeperDatingPodcast.com. There, you’ll be able to sign up for my mailing list, receive the first two chapters of my book for free, and learn more about working with me, because I’m going to be soon having a very exciting and powerful intensive for people who want to take this work to the next level. Also, everything I share in this podcast, please know is educational in nature. It’s not medical or psychiatric advice or treatment for any condition. If you’re experiencing any serious psychological conditions, please seek professional help. By the way, if you like what you’re learning here, it would be a fabulous thank you if you subscribed on Apple Podcast and left me your review. Thank you so much for that.

The Dating Shift

Let’s jump in and speak about how you can shift the way that you’re dating so that you are much, much, much more likely to meet someone who’s really good for you. I want to say that how to meet someone who’s really good for you intersect with where to meet someone who’s really good for you. So, we’re going to be talking about where to meet someone who’s really good for you a little bit, but mostly we’re going to talk about the how and we’ll get to the where in other episodes. But really, you can take the tools that you’re going to learn and the insights that you’re going to learn in this podcast and change how you meet people and who you meet, truly, literally change who you are in your dating life, and to great, great benefit. Here’s the thing,

Dating is a really, really scary thing.

You’re going into the unknown. You’re in this process of making a complete stranger somehow into the closest family you have. That’s a scary kind of thing. Then there’s the huge fear of rejection, the huge fear of being hurt, the fear of rejecting someone else, the fear of getting trapped, the fear of being either rejected or suffocated in a relationship, all the pain that can come out of a relationship. It’s a huge deal. It’s a huge deal because this is going to influence your future more than almost anything else. Yeah, I think you can have fun dating. Absolutely. I do think that. But I think also that to pretend that it’s not kind of a big deal and that the stakes can’t get really high, really fast is kind of insulting to each one of us.

Breaking Our Defensive Patterns

Because it is the truth, and hence it’s easy to get afraid. Because this is real stuff here. It can quickly and easily become really real stuff. Fear is up for all of us. Fear is a good thing and a sane thing in this case. It makes perfect sense. It means you mean it. But it’s what we do with the fear that really matters. And so if we make room for, if we take this step, which we’re going to take today, of understanding what do we do when we get afraid in our dating life, what are our defensive patterns? Because whatever they are, those defensive patterns we sink into when we get afraid can be pretty sure they’re not helping us find love or the kind of love that we’re really looking for. When we can understand what we tend to do when we get afraid and replace that with, instead of being defensive, learning how to radiate who we really are, and then learning to become discriminating in only choosing people who resonate with that, who make us feel safe, who love what they see, and we love what we see when we meet them. That’s the change that has to happen. It’s from defending to radiating. It’s from protecting to being. Is that an easy change? No. Is it a doable change? Absolutely, yes! But the first step is kind of knowledge about this a little bit more, and that is understanding, and we’re going to do this together right now. We’re going to look at what are our patterns in dating when we get afraid. I’m just going to share a story with you. At one point, I just knew that I was like the worst dater and I knew that I needed help.

The Homework

I went to see a psychotherapist, a wonderful, wise psychotherapist. I said, “You’ve got to give me homework. Like, you have to help me with this.” And he did. He gave me homework and it really helped and it was really important. I want to tell you one of the exercises that he gave me that I think I’ll never forget. It was explosively powerful. Here’s what it was. He said the next time you’re in an event where you can meet people, which for me at that point being in my, what was I in, I guess I was in my early 30s, and like doing the clubs in New York, and the way that I met people was in bars and it was in clubs. This was like the heyday of that’s how gay men met each other. Not all, but many of us. Anyway, this was the assignment that he gave me. He said, “Go into whatever venue you go into and I want you to just sit there and I want you to notice the thoughts that you have about yourself and the thoughts that you have about other people. Just stay maybe half an hour and notice what you think. Then leave and go to a cafe and write those thoughts down.” So I did. I noticed what I thought. I left. I went into a cafe and let me tell you, when I wrote down the vicious judgmental thoughts I had about myself, the critical and judgmental and superficial thoughts I had about other people, I just looked at it and I said, “Holy cow, I totally get why I am single. I totally get it.”

Sculpting Fears

But what that was was this kind of jungle of fear-based thinking and behavior, which the dating world absolutely sculpts, and some environments more than others. Online environments can sculpt that, bars and clubs can sculpt that, dating events can sculpt it. Almost anything can sculpt it. Some things worse than others. We’ll be talking about that soon. But this is the first part that I’d like you to take a moment to think about.

When you get scared in dating, what do you do?

I’m going to give you some potential options that many or most of us do. One thing is we present an airbrushed version of ourselves. We don’t act like who we really, really are. Or maybe we’re drinking, and so we think we’re being really authentic, but when you’re drinking, the kind of courage to be yourself is a sloppy courage and it’s not the real you. There’s a level of refinement and sensitivity there that is dulled and out the window. That kind of bravery is not real bravery. Are you really the real you? Are you showing the real you? So many of us present an airbrushed version. We feel like we need to act more confident, or more cool, or less human somehow. That’s one thing that people do. Another thing that people do is we practice avoidant behavior. We don’t really approach the people we’re interested in. We stay like on the other end of the room from them. We don’t take strong bold action or brave action. Let me just say that one of the deep rich ingredients that we all got to kind of bite the bullet on is being a little bit braver in getting out there. That’s another kind of pattern.

Fear Tactics

A third pattern is going for the 100,000% top of the line hotties only, the people who were like iconically exciting for us. Because when we do that, we’re fleeing intimacy, interestingly enough, and oddly enough, because we are looking for a type. All of us are type-bound, some worse than others, but when we just look for a type, there’s a way that we’re not being present. We’re scratching an itch. We’re acting something out where this iconic person represents something to us, and in our minds we’re saying this is what love looks like, this is what attraction looks like, and anything else is second best. That’s a fear tactic because when we get afraid, like in the dating world when we get afraid, we move into am I attracted to this person and is he or she attracted to me? That becomes the primal question. If we’re attracted, we either run or we move in really fast. If we are not immediately kind of unequivocally attracted, we often just kind of fade away. That I want to say one of the great skills, is softening that kind of desperate feeling. I understand the desperate feeling so well. God knows I’ve lived it so often in my own dating life. But that desperate feeling is if I start getting to know someone I’m not really attracted to, A – am I wasting my time and missing out on someone sexier? B – is this person going to get interested in me and then since I’m not like super excited for them, I’ll be getting myself into hot water. I’ll be disappointing them. I’ll be trapping myself. This is another fear. I want to say something very powerful here about another tool for meeting someone who’s really right for you.

Fear-Based Circuitries

Imagine a spectrum of attraction. Imagine the people who are zeros are people that there’s absolutely no attraction to, and people who are tens are people you’re wildly crazily attracted to. Where do you tend to look for people? Do you look for people that are interested in you, even though the number of attraction is really low because it’s safer? Or do you gravitate toward the people who are like the highest, highest end, and either avoid them or kind of jump in for the kill? What I want to ask you to consider doing is latching into a wiser healthier circuitry. Because those are fear-based circuitries. Here’s the circuitry I’m suggesting. Look in the middle range, or like the sixes, the sevens, the fives, people with whom there is some potential spark, and just speak with them and allow yourself to get to know them. Because you may find their voice is so sexy, or their laugh is so sexy, or what they do in the world is so sexy, or their body is so sexy, or the connection between the two of you is so beautiful and nice and exciting and wonderful that you’re interested in more. But we don’t do that when we’re afraid. We don’t go into that middle range when we’re really afraid. We either avoid, we go to the low range or we go to the high range. I want to encourage you to give yourself the space to just relax a little bit and look for people in the mid range who inspire you by who they are. There’s almost nothing more powerful that you can do to change your dating experience. Now, how do you do that online? We’re going to talk about that another time.

Stretching Out of Fear

What I’m describing now is more for real connection and in-person time. But I guess I will say one thing about meeting people online using this method, you look for things that they say that inspire you. You don’t say things like, “I’m not dating anybody who’s more than 20 miles away.” Because really, really, really, if your soulmate was 40 miles away, would you say no to them? I hope not. In the beginning, stretch out. Fear makes us narrow our focus. Also, the online world sculpts us to think, “I’m going to get the absolute best I can, so why not go for exactly what I want?” Well, that’s not a good route, because exactly what you want is someone who’s beautiful, and inspiring, and safe, and exciting, and decent, and that person might be more than 20 miles away. They might be a little bit outside your age range. Allow yourself that freedom. Note where fear-based behaviors make you make your dating world smaller. Just take a minute to think about this. Now, I know it’s hard and I know it’s scary, but here’s what I want to tell you. It’s like being on a trapeze, right? Then you’re going to jump off one trapeze and there’s a period where you’re airborne and you don’t have anything to hold onto, but then you grab the other trapeze. You’re switching circuitries here. When you calm your dating experience and your nervous system enough to notice who inspires you and to have the time to do that, you activate a different circuitry, and that’s the circuitry most likely to be able to help you find real love.

Switching Circuitry

It’s a circuitry that is less fear-based and more based on the quality of connection, and that quality of connection is a big, big deal. In a way, we’re kind of riding against a cultural tide that teaches us how to be superficial, that sculpts jerky behavior that teaches us not to show our vulnerability. That’s another thing that I talk about all the time is that the dating world is a culture of unkindness. You do not have to, nor should you, allow yourself to become like that. I encourage you to be kind, be decent, be generous, and then just look for people who are the same. There’s a kind of steel strength that we need to say my intention is to be who I am. Really radiate that, because again, there are two choices when we’re dating and when we’re out there. There’s the radiating who we are and there’s the defending and protecting ourselves. Our goal is to be the radiating who we are person and look for the precious people who get it. I want to tell you something, and this is the place of leaping off that trapeze onto another one. And this is a promise. There are people out there who, when you are just you, will love that, will be drawn to it. From the beginning when you meet people like that, you’ll know that you have found something better, something healthier. The more that you allow yourself to do that, the more you will meet people like this.

The more you feel that you have to wait to show your authentic self until you’ve sealed the deal and gotten someone hot to like you, the less you’re likely to find real love.

This truly, truly is the golden path.

The Other Side of Fear

Something else I want to say here is that environments sculpt behavior. Oh, but I’m going to say something else first. I’m going to say something else about fear. This is another piece of fear. We’re saying that dating can bring up fear. There’s a saying,

Fear is excitement without breath.

In other words, fear, especially fear in dating, obviously, the other side of that coin is excitement. You might be meeting somebody wonderful tonight. This person who you’re meeting for a blind date might be THE person. Your goal is to find the person who is the person. So there is not only fear, but there is excitement. When you live the way I am describing in your dating life, you will not only feel like you’re being brave, but you will feel like you’re doing something good and decent and smart for your being and for your future. Then your acts of bravery are actually acts of adventure. Here’s another really, really interesting thing. The research shows that when we heightened our risk, not by unhealthy things, but by the things I’m describing, the risk of deeper authenticity, the risk of showing who you are, the risk of looking for people and trusting in the connection more than the immediate iconic type kind of circuitry. When you do that, when you do that, you will be, by the fear that you are creating, that fear sparks erotic fantasy and sparks romance. You will be upping the ante, you will be turning on the gas to the possibility of you being brave enough to meet someone, being excited by somebody because you’re amping up the fear but it’s a good fear and it’s a conscious fear. It’s a bravery fear. It’s an adventure fear. All these things really work.

Where Is The Person Who Is Right For You

These are messages of hope and positivity instead of messages of game-playing. Now, the last thing I’m going to say is about where to meet people, and we’re going to go into this in more detail in a later episode, but I just want to say a couple of things. We had a Deeper Dating event once when we were doing live Deeper Dating events and the leader said something. He asked the community, he asked the people, “So where do you meet people?” People gave all different answers and one person said, “On the street,” and another person yelled out, “Which street?” Because we all want to find the kind of the street or the place. I just thought that was a really kind of cute story. But it speaks to something and it speaks to this. If you’re at Starbucks, if you are on the street, if you are anywhere and you’re not looking at your phone but you’re looking at the people, and if you are kind of in a heart space and if you’re in a space, where you’re saying, “I am going to show my authentic self, my real self, the self where there is passion, the self where there’s energy, the self that is the true underneath me, I’m going to show that and I’m going to be brave.”

Trust me, every day then is an adventure.

Also when you do that, you radiate something different. You really, really do, and you change your luck by doing that. Wanted to say that, but then I wanted to talk about places where you go to meet people. Environments sculpt feelings. Environments sculpt behaviors.

Radiating Versus Defending

So if you’re doing the apps that are swipe right, swipe left, the apps that kind of sculpt quick fear-based decisions based only on iconic types or whatever, you are going to be less likely to find real love. Because you’re operating out of a circuitry that is missing the proper antenna that you need to find someone who’s really going to be good for you. What I want to say is that the more you look for love by going to events with people of the gender or genders that you’re most interested in. For straight women, you don’t want to just keep going to events that are all women, and there are a lot of events that have men in them as well. And not just gay men. The more you go to events with people who share your values, the more you will easily be sculpted toward radiating versus defending. Again, it’s that state of radiating where you work your magic in the world, and where somehow your message, your energy goes out and your antenna comes up that’s a wiser antenna, and you are in the circuitry that’s going to find you love so much quicker. You can do that more easily without as much feeling like you’re swimming against the tide by going to events with people who share your values. God knows, I know, that it is so much easier to stay at home in your jammies and just go online, or just swipe right or swipe left. But I’m telling you, you lack living chemistry when you do that, and that makes it harder and slower, and also, as I mentioned, locks you into a number of circuitry patterns that just won’t work as well.

Join The Journey To Love

I know it’s hard. I know it’s scary. I know it’s annoying. But going to events, especially I would say weekend events or workshops because there’s a process of immersion where people get through their fear more. Or events that are ongoing, because then people get to know each other more as well. The more you do that, the more likely you are going to be to find someone who is good for you. I think you can see that this is a journey that’s a richer journey than you might have been taught, a journey that involves growth, a journey that involves dignity, and a journey that involves the deepest lessons of love. Try these techniques out. Get a friend to do this with, because it’s hard to do it alone, if you can, if not, do it alone. But try these techniques. Go to DeeperDatingPodcast.com and look under Ask Ken and report back on what you experience. For those of you who are interested in a much deeper dive, taking this work with my guidance in a small community of people over a longer period of time, go to Work Privately with Ken and you can learn more there. I want to ask you again, if you liked what you heard, do leave a review for me. Thank you so much for listening. Good luck in your dating and growth adventures. I look forward to seeing you on the next episode of the Deeper Dating Podcast.

What do you do when love disappears? (Either your love for your partner or your partners’ love for you.) This is perhaps the most painful and least understood relationship dynamic of all. In this episode, you’ll learn about what causes this experience, and what you can do to bring the love back.

Episode Table of Contents

• Subterranean Love
• Where Is The Love?
• The Miracle
• The Exquisite Magic of Intimacy

Episode Introduction: When Love Disappears

What do you do when it feels like love disappears? Your love for your partner, your partner’s love for you? Stay tuned to the Deeper Dating podcast to learn what causes this dynamic and what you might be able to do to transform it. Hey everybody, welcome to The Deeper Dating Podcast. I’m Ken Page and today I’m going to talk about the feeling like your love has disappeared or like your partner’s love has disappeared or is disappearing, which is one of the strangest and most troubling and most misunderstood dynamics in our relationship lives. Every week I’m going to share with you the greatest tools and insights I know to help you find love and keep it flourishing and heal your life in the process because the skills of dating are nothing more than the skills of love and the skills of love or the greatest skills of all for a happy rich life.

What Listeners Are Saying

And if you want to learn more about the deeper dating approach to intimacy and how it can speed and ease and deepen your path to love, just go to deeperdatingpodcast.com and there you can receive a free gift of an ebook of the first two chapters of my best selling book, Deeper Dating: How to Drop the Games of Seduction and Discover the Power of Intimacy. And in those two chapters, you’ll learn the skills for discovering your own core intimacy gifts. And at that website you’ll also find a transcript of this entire episode. Also, I just want to say that everything I’m going to share in this podcast is educational in nature. It’s not medical or psychiatric advice and it’s not treatment for any condition. And if you’re experiencing any serious psychological conditions, please seek professional help. It would be wonderful if you like what you’re learning here for you to leave me a review on Apple Podcast or elsewhere and to subscribe to this podcast. So thank you so much for that and thank you for the amazing, amazing, beautiful reviews that I’ve gotten.

Subterranean Love

Okay, so let’s jump right in. I think that that experience of feeling like a new love you have or an old love you have or that someone has for you just somehow is disappearing is one of the most troubling, disconcerting, displacing and painful experiences we can have. It’s like the loss of home. The Beatles wrote this lyric they said, love has a nasty habit of disappearing overnight. What a painful thought. But what I want to say about that is that it’s not true. What love has is a complex habit of appearing to disappear overnight, but it doesn’t disappear. Love doesn’t disappear that easily. Does it go subterranean? Yes. I’ll never forget an experience with an ex of mine. We were having a really difficult time, very, very painful time and it had lasted for a while and I remember looking at him at one point and just saying, “Do you still love me? I’m not sure if you still love me anymore.” And he said something so wise that I have never forgotten. He said,

“It’s like when the sun goes into eclipse, it’s not that the sun isn’t there, it’s that you don’t see it anymore.”

And he said, “I don’t see my love for you now, but I know it’s there. It’s like the sun in an eclipse.” And Oh man, that was so wise. That was really very powerful. Not easy to hear, but so much easier than this feeling that the ground could just disappear under you. And because we are not trained to understand that love goes subterranean. Like if you could imagine a brook or a stream that’s there, beautiful, gurgling, moving, and then it kind of goes underground as water can sometimes do.

Playing Hide and Seek

And then you think it’s gone, but it’s not gone. It’s still moving. It’s there, but it’s under the earth and it can come up again. But we are not taught that that’s so, and the truth is that love is so deep and so profound and so complex and touches on our very kind of survival mechanisms, our greatest places of joy and our greatest places of pain, dependence, shame. All those different things so profoundly that we don’t get to steer its course in any linear way because it’s bigger than our conscious mind. It’s deeper and there are times it goes subterranean. I didn’t know that that was true for a really long time. So what I’m going to talk about today is I’m going to talk about that experience of love going subterranean, but feeling like it’s disappeared or disappearing. And I’m going to talk about that in relation to when that happens in dating, early dating, when it happens as we’re building a relationship and when it happens in an ongoing relationship. Obviously there’s such richness here and complexity, it’s something we’re going to be talking about lots more in lots of different ways. But I want to kind of hone this down to this deeply disconcerting experience. Walt Whitman wrote a poem, I think it was called, On The Terrible Doubt of Appearances, and this terrible doubt when it appears that your partner’s love is gone or that your love is gone, and what causes that kind of eclipse experience and what we can do about it when that happens. So let’s dive in. When does love go subterranean?

When Love Goes Into Hiding

It can go subterranean when we’re afraid. It can go subterranean when the joy, the intensity and the profundity of it becomes so great that we just have to block it out because it’s getting too big there. So we kind of like freeze or numb. That happens a lot. That’s something that happens interestingly for couples sexually when their relationship deepens, they find that they’re sexually attracted to each other, they’re dating, and then at a certain point the bottom kind of drops to a deeper level and all of a sudden sex becomes awkward and uncomfortable. And it’s because the sexual expression has not matched this kind of lowering of the depths, the bottom of love. And they think, “What’s wrong? What’s wrong? I don’t feel like I want to have sex now or I feel like I want to have different sex or I feel like I don’t even want to orgasm or have sex. I just want to hold this person or I don’t even know what I’m feeling.

But I kind of feel like crying now and I don’t know what it is.”

All of these kinds of things that happen that make us feel like, “Oh, is my turn on disappearing?” So that’s another thing is that when the profundity greatens, love can feel like it’s disappearing. Another time that this happens is when we reach a stage of deeper commitment and deeper risk. And I remember in my relationship with Greg at a certain point, he said to me, “So Ken,” We lived in different States at this point. He lived in New Jersey. I lived in New York and he said, “So I’m buying a bigger house and it’s going to be an intermediate house because my kids are in high school.”

Where Is The Love?

“So we obviously can’t live together because your kid is in school too. But I’m going to get a bigger house and it’s going to have rooms so that there’s room for all of us to be together on the weekends.” Now, what a beautiful, wonderful thing that is? But I want to tell you what I felt when he said that. Nothing but numbness. I thought, where has my love gone? That’s a really inappropriate response. But I felt nothing but numbness and fear because it was a big step and my insides had not yet accommodated to it. So when that happens, we often feel like, “Where’s the love? Where’s the excitement? What is wrong with me?” But once again, it’s that love is a more profound experience than we let ourselves acknowledge. Here’s another thing that happens in early and I guess into dating a little bit and it’s what I call the wave. It is what I call the single greatest saboteur of healthy new love that exists on the planet. And here’s what it is. It’s when love feels like it’s disappearing. You meet somebody, you’re attracted to them, you’re interested in them, you’re excited, this seems really good. You start to fantasize about possible future and then you tell yourself I’m fantasizing to what you know, all that good stuff that happens in the beginning of a relationship. Then all of a sudden this person’s like really available, all of a sudden you lose interest, you become bored, you become irritated…. their nose hairs all of a sudden are obvious. Their laugh becomes irritating. You want to go back to the thrill of the hunt and you feel like, “Where’s my desire?”

The Wave of Distancing

Now this dynamic robbed me of being able to have a relationship for decades until I learned what it was and how to handle it. It’s what I call the wave of distancing. Whenever I give a talk including to big groups of people, I ask people, “How many of you experience this?” And I would say between half and two-thirds of the people in the room at least will always raise their hand. It’s wildly disconcerting. And when this happens, you feel like, “Well, my feelings are gone. I don’t know what that is. Maybe they’re just not sexually exciting to me. Maybe I’m bored by them. Maybe they’re not a good match, or maybe I am just really screwed up in bed with intimacy, but whatever it is, the bottom has dropped out and I’m not feeling those feelings. It would be torture to stay in this relationship without those feelings and it would be unkind to the other person and it would be inauthentic. So let me just get out of here right now while I can.” This is something I did so many times and it’s something so many of us do, but it’s the wrong thing to do. What has happened is that for whatever reason our love has gone subterranean. And if we can at those moments back up a little bit, and I want to say something about sex here, but I’ll say it in a moment.

Back up, give ourselves space and room to breathe. Not ask too much of ourselves.

Slow things down if we need to slow things down but not flee and still find ways to enjoy this person. This claustrophobic suffocation experience of newly growing intimacy will fade and pass and the breezes of affection will come back.

The Moon Behind a Silver Dollar

And your feelings almost definitely will start to come back. And when they do, you’ll have a deeper understanding of whether or not this match is right for you. But we are not taught that that’s the case. It’s a funny thing like you could see the moon and you could hold up a big full moon and you could hold up a silver dollar to your eye and then you don’t see the moon anymore. And the silver dollar is so small and the moon is so big. But because of how we’re positioned, we stopped seeing it.

When we have a growing love, our fear can be like a silver dollar where we literally don’t see the moon anymore. And so many of us flee at that point.

And so many of us have had the experience of having our partner flee. What the hell is wrong? Like we’re getting closer, we’re connecting and all of a sudden they’re gone. And these are some of the reasons why, but I want to give another reason why that happens. And it’s around sex and it’s also a little bit around drinking or drugs. And this is what I want to say about that is sex without kind of equal amount of safety is like miracle grow for our terror of intimacy. Sex without an equal amount of psychic safety will make us regress and one of two things are going to happen. After the sex, we’re either going to want to get out of dodge and get away from there so we can breathe again, or we’re going to get needy and clingy and insecure. And it makes sense because sex is such a profoundly intimate act and the level of safety has not yet matched the level of intimacy.

The Miracle

So one thing that makes that happen is drinking in early dating. So if you drink in early dating and you have sex before you feel safe and before you’re ready, chances are that afterwards, both or one of you is going to experience fear of intimacy symptoms. Now, that’s not always true, but it’s something to really, really, really be aware of because it’s true for many people and it’s something I’ve seen a lot. So then the relationship deepens and the connection deepens and let’s say you get past the wave, both of you get past the wave, which as I said, for those of us that suffer with this, it takes a good deal of compassion and space. But the miracle, the miracle, the miracle is that the wave is a wave and waves pass. And this is an example that I’ve given. When I quit smoking cigarettes, when I got that wave of wanting to smoke, it felt like truth. It felt like biological truth. It felt like emotional truth. I should have a cigarette. Like NOW – I need it, I want it and it’s right that I have that cigarette. And if I did not get seduced by that wave, which thank God I ultimately didn’t, it would crash over me and then it would pass and then I wouldn’t want a cigarette anymore. And my vision would be clearer. And that’s what happens with the wave. So let’s say we get past the wave and we are now into a deeper relationship. Well, when we hit a point where there’s a point of deeper commitment, often we will feel that kind of love going subterranean. There are other things too.

Rupture and Repair

If we start feeling afraid, if we start feeling unseen, if old trauma triggers itself, if we are afraid to show our deepest self and we kind of hide that self, all of those things, will make love begin… the feeling of love, begin to disappear. But the amazing truth is, and this is a piece of it, is that as love can feel like or appear as though it’s going away, it also reappears.

They say that love is a process of rupture and repair and this is kind of a magic thing if we can give ourselves space.

In a relationship, when we give our partners space, when they give us space, when we’re tender with each other, when we’re kind, when we’re willing to have adventures together, when we support each other, when all of those things happen, love can feel like it’s going to reappear and like it does reappear. And that’s a really magical thing. Now when we’re in an ongoing relationship, there’s another thing that happens and that is the numbness of day to day life. And Eli Finkel, brilliant researcher showed a diagram at one point in a " target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer external" data-wpel-link="external">TED Talk of what happens to the vast, vast, vast, vast, vast majority of spousal relationships. And that’s gay, straight, everything, everything. And what it is, is if you could picture a gradual line heading down hill. And that’s what happens to the aliveness and the quality of communication and the actual quality of the relationship as described by members of the couples. And that happens to almost everybody. And why is that? Because it takes work to kind of dig down and find the freshness again and again in a relationship.

Catching Bids

The Gottman’s wonderful, brilliant researchers on relationships, talk about a concept that they call bids. And a bid is when you’re in a relationship and folks, this is true of every, every, every precious relationship in our lives. So bids are, you look at your partner and you say something like, “Oh wow, look out the window. Is that such a beautiful sunset?” That’s a bid. And your partner is on their phone and they go, “I’ll look in a minute.” And at that minute, the color goes away. You have lost that bid. You have made a bid, your partner missed it. The more bids you catch, the more intimacy there is. Every bid lost, especially important ones, creates a tiny bit of numbing, a tiny bit of disappearance of the freshness and the aliveness of that intimacy.

And every bid seen, caught, and handed back with consciousness and presence enriches the feeling of love.

And it’s an amazing, amazing thing. You can go through days and days of like just a mundane kind of existence with your partner, and then there’s a moment where you remember how sexually attracted you are. There’s a moment where he or she just touches you in a gentle way or does something really kind or just takes your hand. They’re just holding hands. The feelings come back and it’s not like you thought you didn’t love this person anymore. But the feelings of that kind of very alive intimacy had gone subterranean and at that moment they come alive again and we get to do that. And what we don’t know, and it’s such a beautiful and profound truth, is that so often when we think love has disappeared, it has not disappeared.

A Reflective Space

It has gone subterranean for deep reasons. And it can reappear, and will reappear, when we allow space for ourselves, allow space for our partners, make the extra effort to make room for them and to think about them and to think about their experience. When we apologize for things we’ve done wrong, here’s a really, really, really, really big one. When you take space for yourself, I don’t know if you find this, I find this, when I take space for myself, I take time to meditate or take a walk or just kind of have space. I begin to think about the people I love and realize bids I dropped and realize why I love them and think of really nice things that I’d like to be able to do for them that I just hadn’t thought of, or remember things that they said that I never followed up on it. And that only happens when I’m in a reflective space. So there’s a softening of heart that happens when we give ourselves that space for reflection. And without it, our hearts become kind of flinty and hardened. And that’s often when love goes a little bit subterranean. Forgiving, that’s another one. If you’re in a relationship, sex, absolutely loving, caring sex, hot, wonderful sex brings back feelings of love. So this experience of the love going subterranean, love eclipsing and then love coming back is part of the ride of the journey. And as we grow in intimacy, we grow to appreciate more and more that we can reclaim love that feels like it’s disappeared. Have you ever had that experience of love feeling like it’s disappeared? And have you ever had the feeling of love, feeling like it reappears?

The Exquisite Magic of Intimacy

It’s a worthy thing to think about what makes love reappear for us. Again, I’m not only talking about times where it feels like love has completely disappeared, I’m also talking about those times in day to day life where we’re just not particularly feeling it because we’re busy. What are those things that make love reappear? What can we do? And another issue is …

How do we make love reappear when it comes to love of ourselves?

For me, time and space and time for reflection is when love reappears most easily. In relationship, it’s with extra kindness, extra seeing and being seen. So often we think love is lost and we move on but it’s not lost. It’s waiting to be reclaimed and waiting to be re-seen and re-witnessed. And that’s kind of, this is part of the poignant bittersweet and exquisite magic of intimacy. With every person in your life who feels like a treasure and it feels like love has gone somewhat subterranean, you can reclaim it in so many cases and all of us can, and that is a gift that makes our entire life richer. So thank you so much for listening. Please go to deeperdatingpodcast.com, join my mailing list. Please subscribe, leave me a review. Enjoy these insights, enjoy these ideas. When you go to Deeper Dating Podcast, just click on Ask Ken and you can leave me a message telling me any reflections or any experiences that you have with these exercises and a number of those I will actually air on the podcast if you like. So, thank you all and I’ll see you next week on The Deeper Dating Podcast.