How To Fail With Elizabeth Day - Stephen Grosz - ‘Real love is going to hurt’

Starting point is 00:00:00 The husband may be legally married to him with the woman, my patient, but he is properly married to alcohol. Some of the best marriages I've seen are failed marriages in life. If you love someone, it doesn't end well. It'll either end in divorce or death. Welcome to How to Fail, the podcast that believes Failure Isn't the ending. It's the beginning of a new kind of understanding. This episode is brought to you by Squarespace, the all-in-one website platform for entrepreneurs to stand out and succeed online. Squarespace is here to support entrepreneurship and help turn your passion into a business. It does so with cutting-edge design, seamless check-out for customers with simple but powerful payment tools. It helps you turn leads into clients, allowing you to grow and communicate with your audience. Their customers include the dusty knuckle bakery and

Starting point is 00:00:59 cafe in East London, and if you know, you know, their bread is amazing. They're a Squarespace customer and a brilliant example of how to do it right. Their training program provides young people who've been excluded by society with the basic skills for work and life. Go check them out. Head to Squarespace.com slash fail 10 for a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, use offer code fail 10, that's fail 1,0, to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. I know from experience that starting your own business can be super intimidating and can feel really isolating. So I empathise with those of you who are currently feeling that way. However, I've got a tool for you that can simplify everything and make you feel less alone. For millions of

Starting point is 00:01:45 businesses, that tool is Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world and 10% of all e-commerce in the US, from household names like Maternity, tell to brands just getting started. Get started with your own design studio. With hundreds of ready-to-use templates, Shopify helps you build a beautiful online store to match your brand style. Turn your big business idea into with Shopify on your side. Sign up for your one pound per month trial and start selling today at Shopify.com.uk slash fail. Go to Shopify.com.com.uk slash fail. Stephen Gross is a practicing psychoanalyst who has worked with patients for more than 45 years.

Starting point is 00:02:36 Born in America to immigrant parents who ran a grocery store in Chicago, by the age of 17 he had read Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams and, in his words, was knocked out by it. He went on to study politics and psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, and at Oxford, where he read PPE. His first book, The Examined Life, was published in 2013 and caused a sensation, going straight to number one in the Sunday Times bestseller list. A book about learning how to live, it was one of the original shelf help titles, and hundreds of thousands of readers, including me, have taken it to their hearts. Now, 12 years on from his debut, gross returns with love's labour. which asks fundamental questions around how to love and be loved in return. Drawing on almost half a century of clinical expertise,

Starting point is 00:03:37 Gros shows how love and sex shape ourselves and how our lives and histories shape our relationships. As ever, he communicates the nuance and power of his work by sharing stories which convey the very human vulnerabilities of both patient and analyst, because, as he puts it, when we cannot find a way to tell our story, our story tells us. Stephen Gross, welcome to How to Fail. Thank you, Elizabeth.

Starting point is 00:04:08 Wonderful introduction, very moving. I'm so thrilled to have you here. I'm thrilled to be here. I'm a huge admirer of yours. And not only are you an exceptional writer and psychoanalyst, you're also so generous, and you turned up with a present for me. And you turned up with a beautiful pen, which is now my favorite writing instrument. So thank you for that as well. But can you talk to us a little bit about an example of how a story might tell us?

Starting point is 00:04:35 Oh, gosh, yes. When I think about patience and I think about ways in which people can get caught up, there are things from their childhood which they will not remember. Some people are born into families where there's a great deal of unhappiness. and throughout their life, they may get a good job, they may get married, but they find ways of spoiling what they have, wrecking the job, wrecking the marriage, wrecking the relationships, and being unhappy. And what you can find sometimes, like as an example of a storytelling them, is that they have an attachment to suffering.

Starting point is 00:05:19 and the attachments linked to that very early beginning where what they learned then becomes familiar to them and it becomes safer and more secure than daring to be happy. So they'll find themselves. I had someone recently who'd gone through a breakup and said, but in an odd way I feel this is normal

Starting point is 00:05:46 now being miserable and on my own again, It feels sort of, and what she was saying was there's something about that which is so familiar, which is me, which is directing my life. And we can start talking about, but actually that's one of the problems which is most difficult to change when someone does have an attachment to suffering. But that's an example of where someone's unconscious is directing them. And if we can't get it into a story and start thinking about it, it would be there, say, throughout her entire life. I don't know if that's clear. It's totally clear, and it's fascinating.

Starting point is 00:06:26 Talk to me a little bit about denial. And so, moving on from that idea that unhappiness might be familiar and that therefore shapes the choices we do or don't make, how much does our denial of something that we secretly know to be true, but that we live our life trying to avoid? How much does that shape our story? I was thinking of denial, when you said the word to know, I immediately thought of failure because I was thinking, I think if you were sort of like the professor of philology, because this is, you talk to people all the time about this.

Starting point is 00:07:01 In a way, when someone comes to see me for a consultation, they usually begin with a failure. It's not unlike the podcast. People begin with my marriage is a failed marriage. My relationship to my parents has failed. I have a terrible relationship to my children or to my body. I overeat. I do this. At work, I do all these destructive.

Starting point is 00:07:19 things. But the first thing, denial I think of is I'm listening, as I'm sure you listened and think, where do they place the cause? And most people, so many people come to my office, I had a man not that long ago tell me about his failed marriage. And I said, tell me, why do you think that is? And of course, the next 35 minutes he spoke about his wife, that the cause of the problem was her. It wasn't in him. So there was a denial about seeing himself clearly. A lot of the things in my new book, Love's Labor, are about, it's really a book about trying to see clearly ourselves and our beloveds.

Starting point is 00:08:01 That's what it's about, that the aim of life is to see oneself clearly and the world clearly. And denial is a refusal to do that. It's the insistence that the problem is over there and someone else, not in me. the failure, if I failed, was because of them. And so the first job that I have to do, which is a little bit different than yours, is to kind of see if they can see some of themselves in that failure. Well, I adored your new book, and I adored your first book. And actually, your first book, The Examined Life, came into my life

Starting point is 00:08:41 when I was going through a major failure, which is when my first marriage was imploding. Right. And interestingly, I started seeing a new therapist, and she said, why are you here? I said, I'm here because I'm doing IVF, and if it fails, I know I'll need some help with that. And she said, how's your marriage? I was like, it's totally fine, absolutely fine, absolutely a-okay. But, of course, she was doing a very clever thing, which was identifying if you need to come and see a therapist about IVF,

Starting point is 00:09:10 it means you're probably not getting that support for your spouse. And that therapeutic journey became the story of my divorce, and the examined life really helped me through that. Right. Before we get onto your failures, I would love to touch on your own childhood. Yeah. It's a very specific experience, I imagine, being raised by immigrant parents in Chicago, grocery store, and your father had left Germany, is that right? Czechoslovakia. Czechoslovakia.

Starting point is 00:09:39 Yeah. Which is, well, it was Czechoslov, it was Austria-Hungary, it was then, it's now in the Ukraine, this little village. And yes, and a lot of our family was killed in the Holocaust. So he came just before the war, went into the U.S. Army, because people did that to become citizens at the time. And I think it was a very optimistic time. You met my mother, and I think they were very happy and felt that life was all in front of them. as so many people did in the States in the 50s and 60s. You've said in the past that when you mentioned the war or when it came up in conversation,

Starting point is 00:10:19 he would sort of wander off rather than talk about it. Well, specifically, I think the Holocaust, I was raised with, for example, a cousin of ours who was in Auschwitz, who had a number on her arm, who I saw very frequently, and there were members of my family. I went to a Hebrew school and again there were lots of Holocaust survivors there and so who had a very ambivalent relationship to these American kids I was born in the 50s

Starting point is 00:10:53 really less than a decade after the war and they will have seen us and thought we were spoiled and they had an ambivalent relationship towards, I mean, they were very kind in one way, but they were all so depressed and angry. And it created all sorts of psychological problems, that cousin of mine who was a survivor, I think it was very hard.

Starting point is 00:11:19 She had been in madness for so long, and I remembered something she told me, she saw a psychoanalyst in Chicago once a week for many years, and she said that he had said to her, you come here once a week to see me not because you are mad but because you lived in a mad world

Starting point is 00:11:40 and I'm here to remind you that the feelings that you have are okay and that's why we meet so it can be different things but it was you know on the whole many ways my childhood was

Starting point is 00:11:58 quite happy within that how moving do you I'm so aware of doing a sort of cod job of psychoanalysis while speaking to one of the greatest psychoanalysis. But do you feel that part of what has drawn you to this line of work is a responsibility to tell stories that otherwise are left untold or snuffed out? Is there that weight? It's very complicated. I think, to be honest, in the new book I mentioned a little bit, one of the things that I discovered, all analysts,

Starting point is 00:12:33 have to have an analysis. And one of the things that I discovered my analysis is that I loved my parents, but I didn't altogether trust them. Part of that was I had a birth defect when I was born. I had to have surgery. And like here, I don't know if you know, but back in the 40s, 50s, 60s, children weren't allowed to be visited by their parents, like a Great Ormond Street, or any of the children's hospitals. You could go once a week or on a Sunday afternoon. Or often parents were allowed in the evening while the children were sleeping to look through a window. And that's how it was where I was in hospital, too. So it breaks a deep fundamental bond as traumatizing to the child.

Starting point is 00:13:14 A lot of my colleagues, too, have had things in their life sent to boarding school or parents who are alcoholic or it's often trying to make sense of, my parents were loving, but I think they thought if we talked about it, it would upset me. So we never talked about it. And that is undoubtedly part of why I became an analyst. And I think a lot of my colleagues have things. They're generally curious. They want to know about why their childhood was the way it was,

Starting point is 00:13:46 why it was shaped the way it was. Let's take a moment to talk about Bumble. The dating app that believes love in all its forms is the foundation to a happy, healthy life. Whether you're starting over after a breakup, stepping into your post-divorce era, or just feeling ready to put yourself out there again, Bumble is here to support you on your journey to love. And trust me, I get it. I was 39 when I got dumped and it wasn't exactly part of the plan. But guess what? I met my now husband on a dating app, proof that love can find you when you least expect it. And believe me, I did not expect it. In fact, I had such low expectations for that particular date, that I had booked flights to move to LA full time that morning. And I just said to myself, I'll get this day at the way and then I can start my new and exciting career in LA. And what do you know, I walked into that hotel bar and my life

Starting point is 00:14:45 changed. That's why I'm such a fan of Bumble. It's genuinely built for people looking for meaningful, authentic relationships. Profiles on Bumble let you show more than just a photo. You can share your interests, values and personality in a way that reflects who you are. If you're ready to give love another shot or just curious about who's out there, why not give Bumble a try? Let's get onto your failures. Right. And before we get onto them, I would love with your permission to quote your email to me. Where you write, these three failures are all in one way or another, failures of seeing, failing to see what psychoanalysis really is, failing to recognize my own voice, failing to distinguish love from its imitation. These failures brought me

Starting point is 00:15:35 embarrassment, unhappiness, and pain. I wouldn't wish them away. Which really is the clarion call of this podcast. Yeah, it is. That's why I like your podcast so much, because it is, you know, sometimes it's interesting. I love watching them. I love listening to them because you see people trying to pull away from, you're gently taking them towards that. Your first failure is, as you put it, to be a psychoanalyst is to fail every day. Yes, I mean, to me, I believed when I started, as I said, every analyst has to have their own psychoanalysis. I thought my analyst was, you know, x-ray vision, he saw everything, he knew everything, you know, and I first went there. Of course, what I learned was the exact opposite.

Starting point is 00:16:22 The psychoanalysis is two people not knowing together. We have to figure it out together, and that means both of us will make mistakes. And I will get it wrong. And that's why it's really important to help the patient that the atmosphere is warm, that it's non-judgment. It's to encourage the patient also to correct me and to come back the next day or their next session and say, you're an idiot. What were you saying? That was completely wrong. And I welcome that because that has to happen. Otherwise, you can't get on to figuring it out. And it really is a collaborative in that way. By the way, I also think love works like that, too, in certain ways, in love between a parent and a child or a couple or a colleague's friends. You get it wrong each day. But the other person in two, it's you're trying. They need. And that's where they know the love is. They know that you're trying to see clearly them and yourself and make sense of it.

Starting point is 00:17:29 So in a way, being analysis, that's just ongoing. There are sometimes when failure is an important feature. And I had a case not that long ago, a young girl who clearly wanted the analysis to fail. She was very entangled with her mother, eating disorder, wanted, so she wasn't turning up, or when she did turn up, she was silent, or she was aggressive, and it took a while to realize that the deal was with her mother would be that I would fail, and that meant that she, the only person who could fix her was her mother, and that she could stop therapy and just be with the mother. And once we saw that and could start putting words to that,

Starting point is 00:18:20 it meant understanding that she was really sad about one of the things we have to do, by the way, when we love, which is to lose things, to let go of the parent to make room for a new relationship. She did not want to do that. And so we could start talking about it. She could get sad. We could talk about the pain of growing up, and the analysis could go forward, and we could progress. Sometimes I had an experience not that long ago

Starting point is 00:18:50 where a patient wants you to fail, young people do this, to see, because they're perfectionists, so many young people are, and they want to see how you cope with failure. Do you, oh, my, you should get upset, or are you kind of more accepting of it and thinking realistically, well, I've done the best I can do?

Starting point is 00:19:13 They want to see how you manage failure. And sometimes people, by the way, give you an experience of failure because they don't have the words to tell you how bad it feels. And they want you to feel a failure and know that you're failing and see you fail, so they know you've had that experience. I saw someone an adult not that long ago whose relationship with their parents was terrible almost from the beginning, and I think the parents were really disturbed, very, very And this person made a wonderful life.

Starting point is 00:19:48 But one of the things that came out in the analysis was I quite often felt I wasn't getting it. And eventually we arrived at a kind of view that she was giving me an experience of what it was like to be her as a child. She never could get her parents to feel what she was thinking, what she wanted, what she, she just couldn't get through to them. And she was giving me an experience of that partly. So I could, I realized, eventually empathize with her. And I said, I think you're giving me an experience of what it was like to be you with your parents. And she said, that's exactly what it was like being with my parents. And are there any clients who you feel that you've just had an abject failure with,

Starting point is 00:20:31 that you haven't helped them in the way that you have striven to do? Yes. I mean, there are analyses which, absolutely, that will happen. I don't know, maybe I'm kidding myself sometimes. because I also think, you never know. One of my teachers, I was doing a child case, a very disturbed child, and I had a wonderful supervisor, distinguished child analyst, and I was saying something, in my 30s, I said,

Starting point is 00:20:59 the child doesn't hear anything I'm saying, we're not getting anywhere, there's a complete, and he said, you don't know what's going in. You do not know what that child is making use of or not making use of. And some of the other than that comes through, because I've had people where I felt the work was failing. And analysis will end if the patient breaks it off or you end it, for some reason, or the two of you agree, which is hopefully what happens. But sometimes a patient will stop.

Starting point is 00:21:28 And I've had a patient abruptly stop, and I felt a terrible failure. And then six months or a year or two years later, they came back. And so you don't know sometimes because sometimes people return and say I got this from it I didn't get this I was very angry at that point in my life because and you go on again as the analyst

Starting point is 00:21:54 do you ever feel angry with a client or judgmental of a client I do of course and it's not that you don't feel those things but you then think about why you're feeling that thing the patient that abruptly leaves wants you to be upset,

Starting point is 00:22:14 you know, wants you to be shocked or angry. And you have to think about, huh, why do they want that? And oftentimes, it's they're furious with you that you're not giving something or seeing something. And I have to, you know, interrogate myself or take my work to a colleague and say, what am I missing?

Starting point is 00:22:32 And there's a lot of that in my work. Colleagues come to me with cases, peers, I take my work to other people, and we discuss it, and think through. But it would be odd not to have feelings. So if someone comes in and tells me they're boring, and I find them incredibly interesting, that would be peculiar, you know, if they say everyone tells you. In my first book, there was a case of someone who I did find extraordinarily boring. I mean, and boredom's different than just being kind of sleepy or to

Starting point is 00:23:05 you're just. It was like being drugged. And it was kind of interesting because you realized it was, you know, in America we say playing possum, you know, of being dead, of like, kind of, I realized that he was doing that as a defense. Possum literally do that so other animals don't attack them. He was doing something to make it so I didn't interact with him, that I couldn't get to him. It was his defense. So it's important to register, oh my gosh, and then to interrogate, why am I having this feeling and make use of that? You also write in Love's Labor about those unspoken, unconscious signals that clients give you. So when they arrive, how they arrive, whether they're a few minutes late, the ballet dancer that you had, who synchronized her movements to yours.

Starting point is 00:24:01 I'd love you to talk a little bit about that, about what you notice. Yeah, I mean, I do all sorts of works. I see some people once a week or twice a week. But a large body of my work is seeing people intensively four or five times a week. That's not for everyone, but it's appropriate for certain people. And some people, the more you see someone, the more you're aware of their habits. So there are people that arrive literally right at the dot of their session, and they come right in.

Starting point is 00:24:34 And they buzz, I open the door, they come in, and they never have to wait in the waiting room. And there may be reasons for that that they can't bear. I worked at a forensic clinic, and that's what somebody did. He came right in one minute after his session started. He came up the stairs to his room. And it turned out one of the things that he did was he would never wait in the queue at supermarkets. He would just steal what he wanted because he couldn't bear cues. So if he had something he would just walk out with,

Starting point is 00:25:03 There's people that the ballet dancer was somebody, I just began to notice, no matter how quickly or slowly, I would walk to my chair and sit down, she would move across the room and sit down onto the couch at the same time I sat down into my chair. I don't think she noticed. It wasn't conscious. You couldn't plan that. The guy who turns up one minute late or the people who turn up one minute early or I think I mentioned a patient always closes the door. another patient would always crack his knuckles before starting. He'd lay on the couch and then do that every day. If you put it in your diary, crack knuckles, you would get it wrong.

Starting point is 00:25:47 But one of the things that's borne in on you when you do the work that I do is the power of the unconscious. The intensity, the vehemence of how our lives are driven in a certain way by things we're not aware. of. The ballerina, I think, felt our minds were in sync. If we could both sit down at that moment, there was a kind of mind meld. I could almost know what she was thinking, and we were closer if we were moving at the same moment together. And she'd had years of that, I mean, since she was a tiny girl doing ballet school. And she just sort of, I think, didn't even think about it as a thing. And one of the stories of my book was about a patient who's always 15 minutes late, and slowly realizing that the missed part of the session actually was in some

Starting point is 00:26:36 ways the most important part of the session, that there was quite a narrative about absence, and the story was in a way how, with that patient, she had had an older sibling and had died, and that the mother was still quite involved with. And she came to believe, I think, from birth, that what was not there was more... thought about than what was there. And so she always gave me a chunk of each session when she wasn't there, because that's when I would be thinking about her, and as if I would be thinking about her more when we weren't together.

Starting point is 00:27:15 So those things can have a powerful impact that we don't even realize. Yes, absolutely. In our relationships. With Amex Platinum, access to exclusive Amex pre-sale tickets can score you a spot track side. So being a fan for life turns into the trip of a lifetime. That's the powerful backing of Amex. Pre-sale tickets for future events

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Starting point is 00:28:41 health care. This idea of change and loss being so embedded with each other, if someone is listening to this or watching this right now and they're in the grip of change or transition and they're fearful of it. Yes. What advice would you give them? Oh, gosh. The thing about change is important. To me, we love is built around loss. Loss is at the core of love. So we're in the womb and we have to give up the womb to have the breast. We give up the breast to have solid food. We give up being at home in the kind of cozy, snuggly thing with mummy and family to go to nursery and reception.

Starting point is 00:29:30 And at each stage of our life, at 18, we will leave home to start work or go to university or whatever we're doing. At each stage, we have to let go of something to have the new thing. And if we don't do that, we can't have the new thing. We have to make room for it. some of the stories in the book are about our resistance to that

Starting point is 00:29:52 some of them are external our love of our parents so the second sir I think is about a girl who can't send her wedding invitations and she can't understand quite why she can't do that and that's about the anxiety of letting go of her parents I saw someone recently who was in their 70s whose father in his 90s was dying and what was interesting about that was she and her husband were more children of her family than they had never really made a family of their own and the children that they had had were all sort of the children of her parents her attachment to them was paramount and she had never given it up or reduced it in any way to make for the marriage and her husband and his life, and to build a new thing together.

Starting point is 00:30:52 So, you know, the example you're bringing about someone who's finding it difficult, it is difficult. It's probably the most difficult thing there is, is accepting that loss. And it can be more complicated, it can be not just letting go of an external thing like our parents, too. Sometimes we'll be in a marriage. We love our husband or wife. But we see an aspect of ourselves that we refuse to let go of, that we have to let go of, if we're really going to have proper intimacy and surrender to our beloved.

Starting point is 00:31:28 And if we don't do that, it's not going to happen. And people, again, those are aspects of ourselves. Sometimes people just refuse to let go of. Wow. That was so good. Do you see... I totally understand. And also it feels to me, as you're talking, that loss is inimicable to...

Starting point is 00:31:45 love. Like, loss is the price you pay. It's the ticket of admission. In life, if you love someone, it doesn't end well. It'll either end in divorce or death. It's the deal. It doesn't, you know, it isn't like there's some other, the title heading for the episode. It isn't like there's some sort of, you know, fudge on this. Real love is going to hurt because you're going to really love someone and at some point there will be loss. And people do try to fudge. That's one of the obstacles, I think, to really deeply loving someone that I'm trying to write about in the book. So it's about those things that we do internally to avoid facing truths like that rather than kind of accepting them.

Starting point is 00:32:32 And accepting them with our beloved can make us even closer. Well, talking of acceptance and being beloved brings us onto your second failure, which is that you wanted to write like a psychoanalyst rather than as yourself. Right. And you falling in love, I believe, and getting married was integral to helping that process along. It was. I married my wife when I was 50 and had children then for the first time. And there were a number of things that came together. There was that experience. For the past 25 years, I've had breakfast twice a week with two friends. breakfast of them this morning. They're both writers. One wrote for the New Yorker, one writes for newspapers here, and they were very encouraging for me to write. I also taught at UCL. I taught the University of London University of College a course on the case history

Starting point is 00:33:31 in writing for about 10 years. And all those things kind of came together, and I think made me feel, I say in my acknowledgments that fear is the enemy of writing, I think all of a sudden I felt two things, I felt supported, I had a safety net of people who'd read my stuff and say, it's wonderful having great first readers and people who look at things with it, being loved, having my children, but also, that was the only thing, my mother died, got cancer fairly young, my father had had a number of heart attacks by the time it was just past 50 and I thought

Starting point is 00:34:14 I also had a motivation to write because I wanted my children to know what I was doing all day. So part of the first book The Examined Life came out of all of that. Up until then I had written articles like analysts write for the journals

Starting point is 00:34:31 and book group reviews and things that had a few readers. It wasn't from the heart But there was something about having that safety net, feeling held, loved by my family and friends, their friendship, my students' encouragement, that made me feel, yeah, I can try this. Well, was there part of that that made you feel good enough as you were without having to perform, quote, quite perfectly? Yes, I think that's true. And your children were young when you wrote The Examined Life, and now they must be. Yes, my son is 19, my daughter's children.

Starting point is 00:35:09 22. Have they read the examiner? Oh, yeah, they have. But of course, at their age, I know nothing. I mean, they know everything and I know nothing. Well, they're perfectionists. They are actually. They're very, very successful and very, very good at what they do. And they're very good students. I'm enormously proud of them. But they're, no, no, no, I don't want any psychoanalysis. Right. And, of course, in my own family, no analyst has any power with people. You know, I can't. So we've heard how being married and becoming a father changed your writing. Did it change the way you practice analysis?

Starting point is 00:35:52 I think it did. One of my friends that I had breakfast with said this, that the way I used to be very, very austere in the beginning. You know, there was a kind of, you know, when people came, almost barely said hello, because there was a kind of austerity, a radicalism, like, you know why you're here, I know why you're here, there's the chair, here's my chair, speak. You know, it's a kind of, and then I felt it's more letting them see that I don't know. I think one of the things people like in my writing is I sometimes say, I got it wrong. a mistake, I found myself envying my patient here, or feeling jealous, or feeling, you know,

Starting point is 00:36:44 that, and I'm, patients see it all anyway. They see a lot of that, and it's worthwhile than talking about it, too. So. Patients and children see it all. Yes, absolutely. The best interpretations have been made by my children. Yeah. They will say, yeah. You've been compared to Chekhov, who I know is one of your heroes, in no lesser publication than the New York Times. How important is success to you? It is important. But do you care about being a bestseller? I have to tell you, when the examined life, it really surprised me. I mean, I found it really surprising. I had to give the stories that were about patients, two patients to read, and they read them, and they said, yeah, this is fine. I think all of us expected it to, you know, kind of end up like in a little book in a specialty psychology bookstore or something, that it became so popular, surprised them. The book was like things on Book of the Week and hearing it on the radio or read, audible, and things like that. audio versions, was surprising, because I just didn't expect that at all. I did enjoy it. It was

Starting point is 00:38:07 wonderful. In part, too, because you feel you're doing something, and now other people know about it. And we know lots of people asked for analysis, asked for therapy, counseling, and things came out of the book, which was, to me, a wonderful, wonderful thing. If it helped people, that was great. Because one of the things that I struggle with, obviously a large part of my life's work is about failure. And understanding it and understanding it is something that leads us to greater lessons about ourselves. And yet, I also have this, I think, ego-driven sort of esteem issue, which is about external recognition and validation and chart position or sales figures. And it's a constant battle, and I wish I could just let go of all of that.

Starting point is 00:38:58 I'm not sure why you should feel, because it means it matters to people. It means people care about it. They want to hear the podcast. They want to read what you write. So sometimes if you don't like somebody's writing and they don't like what you're doing and they write a bad review, I think that's sort of good. As good as a good review from someone you really admire. And the person who said those nice things and the wonderful things in the New York Times is someone who I've just had huge admiration from. So I think that's important. But what if it's someone you admire who says something negative about you? Then I would really think about it. Okay. Yeah. And she said one or two things in the review that in the new book have changed.

Starting point is 00:39:44 I mean, they get through. If someone you admire said, you know, I think this could have been done differently, I sit up and listen because they really care about the text. That's good. Your final failure, this one left me absolutely breathless. It was so brilliant and opened up a whole new window into how I saw my past romantic life. And as you put it, you didn't understand the difference between surrender and submission. Right. Please explain. When I was in my 30s, I went to have my training analysis, and I didn't understand the difference. Submission is, I thought I was in love, and what I was doing was really something quite submissive, which is the belief that if I give you everything, if I adore you, if I love you, if I do all

Starting point is 00:40:44 the things you want, and it comes from a place of love, you start, it's not, you know, What you will do is you will love me back, and that love is going to heal me and sort of transform me, and it'll be wonderful. Of course, that deal is completely unrealizable and never works. And so over the years, a number of people have come to my consulting room who are bitter, aggrieved, angry, unsettled, and they don't know why. They're giving everything to somebody. Surrender, on the other hand, is that kind of an incredible feeling when two people meet. And it's not white flag surrender, it's surrender almost like in a spiritual sense of really feeling you found your home that you can let go to this person and they let go to you. And the result is a feeling of acceptance, of intimacy, profound intimacy, love.

Starting point is 00:41:40 And that's very, very different. Submission or submissiveness is, in fact, a defense against surrender. It's usually I'll see it in someone who's frightened of completely letting themselves go to another person. And it's a kind of masquerade of love. And you'll hear it in a friend or somebody. I give him everything. I do this, I do that. But in doing that, they are, in a way, saying, I give all this, but it's not doing the transforming thing.

Starting point is 00:42:17 He's not giving the magic thing back, which I need. She couldn't do anyway, or she couldn't do anyway. And I think people get caught up in that, and we are really genuinely surrendered to another person. We're back in the realm of accepting reality, and we realize we will lose them, and they will lose us. And we're now loving properly, which is in time. We realize that life is finite, that we don't have forever with someone, and it's a different experience completely. that sort of submissiveness, you stay in the grievance and you're away from the feelings of real love for another person. It's a very common defense against love, I think, against deep emotional surrender.

Starting point is 00:43:06 I found this distinction so extraordinarily helpful. Right. Because I think I've been trying to reach for the language that you have just used. Right. Throughout my 20s and early 30s, I think I would have described it as people-pleasing. Like that idea of, if I am the best possible partner that this person has ever been with, then they won't leave me. Yes, exactly. But you're so right that I...

Starting point is 00:43:33 And they'll give you something, too. They're going to give you the magic. And it'll be a love that totally changes you. I have people, young people in their 20s coming, and they have a kind of checklist. The person does all this, and they're now giving. giving them everything, and they think that's going to work out, and of course it isn't. Because what they're missing is that kind of deep connection of being able to let go internally and feel that the other person has let go to them.

Starting point is 00:44:01 Yes. There's still a performative aspect to that. It is, performance is really a very good way of looking, because it is to me a kind of masquerade or a performance of love. And it's interesting psychologically, too, is sometimes the defense against the thing looks exactly like the thing. So this person doing all this stuff, I'll give him everything. Your friends would have thought in your 20s, oh, what a loving person was with us, that she gives everything, what a wonderful, he's so lucky to have her. And in a way he was, but in a way neither

Starting point is 00:44:35 of you were, because it wasn't the right thing. And also, he wouldn't have had me, actually. He wasn't getting me. Yeah. Because I didn't know who that was. So I could didn't show up as that, and nor did I feel safe doing so. Yes. And that's usually what it's about, is we don't feel safe turning up as ourselves. I love how you talk about surrender, being this ability to sink into true vulnerability because you feel safe and held. That, the way that you talk about it sounds like something that has to be built over time. It does. And actually, interesting, and I was thinking on the way over here today, That failure is a part of that.

Starting point is 00:45:19 I think some of the best marriages I've seen are failed marriages, that then there's a kind of remarriage. They are legally married. Yes. And then they come to hate each other. I mean really hate each other, which you have to do at some point. And then a patient of mine said a while ago, man said, I was telling her she was this and this, and I was thinking she's awful.

Starting point is 00:45:52 And then I thought, God, but she's married to me. I am really awful. I am appalling. How does she put up with me? And he had started using the things we'd seen in an analysis and was able to say, God, the woman is a saint for tolerating me because I'm so, that when I say like remarriage, People can be legally married, but what I'm trying to get at is there's a kind of deep psychological marriage. My favorite films are all those Hollywood comedies of remarriage, Philadelphia's story, Bringing Up Baby, the Lady Eve, all the black and whites rom-coms of the 30s and 40s.

Starting point is 00:46:34 They all begin with a marriage for various legal reasons. You couldn't show people in bed unless they'd been married. So Hollywood quickly got them married. That's a great fact. Yeah. And then they got unmarried. And then the wife's dating somebody else, but for some reason, she has to go back to the first husband to get something. And then they properly fall in love and are married at the end of the film.

Starting point is 00:46:58 And those were hugely popular, and I think they're hugely popular in part because they speak to something the podcast gets at your stuff, which is we're in a marriage, it fails, it really fails. And then if we are able to see clearly, we can really fall in love. They are all films where you feel at the end, they are now finally with the right person who wasn't the right person at the beginning. And they do the thing, you say it, of feel safe enough because they've been through all this to show their true selves and to be really close. Because you can still be in relationship with a relationship, even if it's ended. You can. And in some couples, I don't think, end. The difference between a legal marriage and a psychological marriage. It's not uncommon for me in my consulting room to have somebody whose husband or wife is addicted to alcohol. The husband may be legally married to the woman, my patient, but he is properly married to alcohol. It consoles him, it soothes him, it is the thing which takes care of him. It is to the thing.

Starting point is 00:48:13 it is to what he turns. He doesn't turn to my patient, who is his legal wife. A proper marriage is that thing which I'm trying to get at, which is something deep and psychological, which involves things like surrender and this kind of very deep attachment. If anyone is listening or watching this right now and they're going through a divorce or a breakup

Starting point is 00:48:36 and they are grieving the thing that they thought they had and they are terrified of what lies ahead and whether they'll ever be happiness ahead or ever love that is worthy of them, what would you say? Oh, gosh. I mean, in a way, it would be odd not to grieve. Of course, we're going to suffer.

Starting point is 00:48:54 One of the first things I say in the book was when I was 31, I didn't understand pain. I thought pain was, you know, and the ordinary pains of love, when we fall in love, our anxiety, we worry about that. we then feel longing for someone. We can feel longing, we can feel anxiety.

Starting point is 00:49:18 And then inevitably there is grief. I thought these were things to be removed. Symptoms, could we avoid these? Is there a medication? Is there something to do? And in fact, what I try to show in my book is those feelings are the most accurate and subtle instrument you have for knowing your heart.

Starting point is 00:49:39 If you don't listen to those pains and you're suffering, you have no way of knowing what you desire. So I've had people in my office who are going through a breakup and they're suffering and sad in some ways. But if they're really listening, they're relieved too. They're getting something is ending. They can sense, oh my gosh, the world's opening up. I have now the possibility of letting go of this. of this and the possibility of really being properly loved, of properly surrendering to someone. If so, someone's going through a breakup, there are all sorts of things, it's really to, the

Starting point is 00:50:22 medicine of psychoanalysis, the medicine of what I do is not in a way so much helping as understanding. If you can begin the work of thinking about why am I upset and what am I upset about. I might be upset about my children. I might worry for them, or I might worry for my elderly parents are going to make of this, and they're going to worry about me, or various things. For myself, I'm relieved. Or you might start noticing all sorts of feelings. I'd be trying to help the person to think about the nature of their suffering, because if you can really penetrate that, you really begin to get a sense of your heart and your feelings. And if it's, if the marriage is coming to an end, my intuition is that there was something not working on both sides. It's rarely

Starting point is 00:51:14 that one person was happy and the other person was, there's something not right. And one of the themes of the book is that we do to deceive ourselves, but we also have the great power to undo self-deception. Stephen Gross, it has been such a privilege being in your company. It hasn't felt like long enough. No, it hasn't. I've really enjoyed being here. It's wonderful talking with me. It means so much to me. You are the poet laureate of human emotion. And actually, the advice that I would add to that listener or that viewer who's going through heartbreak is to reach for your book, Love's Labor by Stephen Gross. It is what you need. And you start the book with a quote from Iris Murdoch. Remember that all our failures are ultimately

Starting point is 00:51:59 failures in love. Thank you so much, Stephen Gross. Thank you. Elizabeth, I really love being here. Please do follow how to fail to get new episodes as they land on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcasts. Please tell all your friends. This is an Elizabeth Day and Sony Music Entertainment original podcast. Thank you so much for listening.

How To Fail With Elizabeth Day - Stephen Grosz - ‘Real love is going to hurt’

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