Good Life Project - Terri Cole: Real Love, Where It’s Hiding

Episode Date: January 12, 2017

Love. It’s one of the most important fillers of our Connection Buckets. But, then there’s this special “type,” some people call it “real love.” We got to wondering what that even means, and why so many people seem unable to “find and keep it.” So, we asked GLP friend, Terri Cole, licensed psychotherapist, meditation expert and founder […]The post Terri Cole: Real Love, Where It’s Hiding appeared first on Good LifeProject. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Today's episode is brought to you by my new book. I know I'm our sponsor. So you guys have heard me talk about it in the past, I think towards the end of last year, my new book, my latest book, How to Live a Good Life came out and I've been blown away by the reception to it. It's very straightforward, surprising science, soulful stories, and practical wisdom. It's a blend of, you know, pretty much a lot of what this show is about, but really distilled into pure, actionable wisdom and insights designed to walk you through a process and introduce you to a model that I call the Good Life Buckets that I hope will really help you live a good life. It's a great

time of year to be exploring this and really using it as a tool to do the things you're here to do, to become what you're knowing you can become, and also to find the grace in being just as you are. So check it out. You can find it pretty much all over Amazon, Barnes & Noble, local bookstores, indies, how to live a good life. Okay, on to our show. Hey there, it's Jonathan with A Good Life Project, short and sweet riff. Today is actually a special guest riff from a good friend of mine, psychotherapist, meditation expert to regular human beings, mortals, and megastars. Her name is Terry Cole, and she's somebody who I turn to when navigating and looking for advice to share with others about some of the really complex parts of relationships. She's been super helpful, especially in some of the work that we've done

with our programs when one person is in a fierce growth mode and a partner in a relationship is not and how to navigate that. And I asked her to stop by today and share some really tactical relationship-based advice about love in a very practical, actionable way. So I think you're going to find it super useful, especially navigating sort of this moment in time. You can find out more about her at TerryCole.com. That's T-E-R-R-I-C-O-L-E.com. And she's got a really cool project now called The Real Love Revolution, which you can learn about over there. Turning it over to Terry now. Enjoy. As a relationship expert and a licensed psychotherapist for the past almost two decades, I've come to a conclusion about true love,

that there's really only one path to get there. And that is self-love, which sounds very vague, sounds very, well, what does that even mean? How do you actually get there? I've worked with so many women over the past 20 years who are seeking this external experience, this validation, this desire to be partnered. And so much of the time, what is getting in their way is actually the way they feel about themselves. Now, nobody wants to hear that the only path to true love is self-love. So let's break it down slightly more specifically. In psychotherapeutic terms, what is actually happening in love, what we're actually doing so much of the time is recreating a situation from the past. How do we know what love is?

It's what has been modeled for us in our life. It's your family of origin. It's the relationship your parents had or your caregivers, right? We don't just fall off the tree knowing what love is. It really is something that we learn, which the good news about that is that if what you learned was terrible, then you can actually unlearn it and learn a healthier way of being. But you have to use your intention to do that. What happens with our parents is that they teach us just by being who they are in the world, right? We have what I call

downloaded blueprints around love. So you have downloaded blueprints around a lot of things, but in this instance, we're talking about romantic love. So you have downloaded limiting beliefs. If love is something that's been eluding you in your life around love, around what's possible around the way that it works. So if you came from a home where love and violence got melded together early on, your experience of love is that love and pain are synonymous and that they go together. When you are seeking a mate unconsciously, if your father was violent, verbally abusive, an alcoholic, there's a part of your mind that will recognize someone with those qualities as someone who would be appropriate to become a husband, to become a partner.

Now, these are not conscious desires, obviously. Nobody is looking to fall in love with an alcoholic because, you know, as they say, alcoholics don't have relationships. They take hostages. And I can tell you from personal experience, that is incredibly true and so painful. But unless you bring this unconscious material, which is what I like to say is in the basement of your mind, up into the main part of the house, you won't be able to dislodge this pattern.

It's a pattern of behavior that you will be compelled towards this behavior, even if that behavior does not give you what it is you say that you want. So the question is, is it really about calling in the one? So I'm thinking about all these dating books and apps and all of that, where is it really about becoming, you know, there's all these things out there for women becoming subservient, sort of making your man feel like a hero, quote unquote, all these other things that as a psychotherapist, I look at and say, no, that's, that's like the wrong avenue. Because the truth around love is that wherever you go, there you'll be with the same unresolved

things that are driving your behavior in a way that you don't want it to be. So I don't see any of this as magical. I like to say it's not magic, it's psychology, because that's the truth. And maybe, I mean, we look at movies and television and look at our common, all of us have these common stories that we've seen from Cinderella to pretty woman that teach us that, you know, either men could be saving women or that there's some, if the stars align properly, we could find our beloved. And as a therapist, I probably have a much less romantic view of that situation because I know that isn't true. And keep in mind, there are always exceptions to every rule. The reason that I became an expert

around romantic love is because A, that's what my clients needed help with. Because so many women, especially, came into my psychotherapy practice needing this, missing this, wanting this, and not being able to decode it on their own. So that's my interest. This information is only for people where healthy, vibrant, balanced, respectful, romantic love has eluded them in their life. You may be the person who had a terrible role model for love. And somehow you did find your person because of who you are, because of, you know, it's nature and nurture, we say as therapists, and actually lots of people say that, where you become who you are,

depending on what your natural constitution is, psychologically, physically, emotionally, we get influenced by our parents, by our environment, by our surroundings, and we are naturally born a particular way. So what to do? Three tips to decode this quickly. Figuring out if you have the disease to please. What does that mean? If you constantly need other people's approval. So the four questions to determine if you have this is, do you say yes when you really want to say no? Do you prioritize everyone else's needs above your own? Do you avoid a confrontation at all costs? And do you apologize often, not only when you're not sorry, but when you're angry? So if you said yes to one or more of those questions, you have some version of the disease

to please. And this gets in the way of you being your authentic self. And it gets in the way of you being able to ask for what you want in a relationship or even know who you really are. So it's really important that that gets handled. The second thing is understanding your downloaded love blueprint. So there's a couple of really empowered questions that you can ask yourself around your parents' relationship or whoever raised you, whatever you saw as a model of love. Who had the power? Did love and violence go together? Did love and verbal abuse go together? Was there affection in the home that you grew up in? Was either one of your parents emotionally available?

These are all questions. Was there affection, right, in your home? These are all questions that if you start answering, you may see a theme in your own romantic life that you've been repeating something that you've seen. And the third tip that I can give you is how can you figure out if you're having a transference? What does that actually mean? Transference means that in current time, you were actually responding in a situation being fueled by an earlier injury that was not healed. So to figure out if you're having a transference in a romantic situation, in a work situation, because how you are anywhere is how you are everywhere, right? You've heard that phrase, how you do anything is how you do everything. Well, this is the same in relationship.

And so in the work that I do, I don't just isolate it as romantic, because I promise you, if you have the disease to please in your romantic relationships, you probably have it in your family relationships and you probably have it in your friendships. So this is about you. Everything comes back to you as a person. It's not about the outside circumstances. So back to the third tip, which is how can the three empowered questions you can ask yourself to figure out when you are having a transference experience, meaning you may not be responding fully from this present moment. The first question is, who does this person remind me of? The second question is, why is this familiar to me?

And the third question is, where have I felt like this before? And I promise you, if you ask yourself one or all of those questions in any circumstance, you will get insight into what unresolved injury you are repeating. So you can stop repeating it and be free to create real, healthy, vibrant, juicy love in your life. And you deserve that, my friend.