Love Life with Matthew Hussey - 237: How To Find Love With Anxious Attachment

Episode Date: April 17, 2024

Matt and Audrey had the pleasure this week of sitting down with Mark Groves, author of the new book "Liberated Love" and host of the Mark Groves podcast. In this episode, we discuss anxious vs. avoidant attachment styles in love, how to overcome co-dependency, getting back together after a break up, and the crucial importance of TRUE honesty and facing reality in having fulfilling relationships. ►► Follow Mark on Instagram createtthelove ►► Pre-Order My New Book, "Love Life" at → http://www.LoveLifeBook.com   ►► FREE Video Training: “Dating With Results” → http://www.DatingWithResults.com

I started to see that that grief was just evidence of the amount I loved and every time you love somebody you're signing up at the exact same time for how much it's going to the Love Life Podcast. I am here with Audrey Hussey to my right. Hi everyone. And across from me, I have Mark Groves, who I was introduced to by a mutual friend. And I can't believe this is the first time me and this man are meeting. I've heard a ton about you, brother. It's a real honor for us to get to sit with you and chat and get deeper into your work. I know that your stuff is wildly popular online and the nuance in the way you say things and the approach that you

bring is really really heartfelt and deep and authentic there's such a connection between your work and ours because of the focus that you have on authentic connection authentic relationships and I'm excited to hear from you today I know I've got lots of questions I know Audrey does too I want to say just before we start Mark and his wife Kylie Macbeth just wrote a brand new book that is called Liberated Love Release Codependent Patterns and Create the Love You Desire which I know is going to be so relevant to so many people in our audience. So I'm excited to get into that today as well. It's love that you guys wrote that together. So exciting to hear and dig into. But thanks for being here, man.

Thanks so much for having me. I'm so excited. And I get both of you. Yeah, you get all of Audrey's questions. I have so many questions. Do you want to kick off? Is there a first question you have? I think we need to kick off by setting context for what your book is about, because I think that in itself is so fascinating. So are you happy to share the story behind how the book came to be and what it's about? It was really born from our own experience. So the book is really part memoir, we tell client stories, and we also walk people through the tools of moving from codependency to liberated love or interdependency. And, you know, it just felt like this is the time

for this book. You know, one, it really is an amalgamation of both of our work individually, like here's two people who really loved each other really had a lot of tools to make a relationship work. And yet we needed to end our relationship. In the book, we have relationship 1.0 and then what we call the sacred pause, which is we joke that that's what you get to call a breakup when you get back together. Otherwise, it's just a breakup.

And then relationship 2.0. And it's structured in that way just for people you know the sacred pause is really about letting the old patterns die and something new be born and i you know if you think of like esther peral she talks about like get divorced but stay together like it's this same concept whether you're single or in a relationship that you're willing to actually let what isn't working go and we think about like what's possible for the world when we dedicate not just the way we love, but the way we live to truth,

to like just telling the truth, to being with reality. We have a whole chapter that's called Getting Right With Reality because so much of our energy and time is spent trying to not notice the thing that's true or not have the conversation that we need to have and we look at our relationship 1.0 where we were still in codependent patterns you know my mind was very much that i've chased love my whole life essentially so for a lot of people that would be seen as like, I'm more anxiously attached. And for my wife, there was a self-identification of like, what's wrong with

me that I can't choose this relationship or that I didn't make my previous marriage work. And I think about my own work, which I really monetized my codependency, right? Like I think of all the people in caretaking service sort of work coaches therapists physiotherapists doctors there's a survival strategy that made them really good at attuning to people and people naturally came to me with their challenges and uh you know it becomes a superpower when it's no longer where you source your worth. And so for me, there was like, oh, my wife has this, my now wife. But when we were together, it was like, oh, you're still trying to heal from your divorce. You think there's something wrong with you. I have all these tools. Like, this is perfect. I'll be something you need.

And if I'm something you need, then you can't't go anywhere and she had to process this idea of like what's wrong with me that I can't choose this relationship with Mark and fully show up she had it just for context she had had this dream early in our relationship and uh I went out for a run and I came back and I had this awareness I was like man I feel like every time I get close to you, you distance. And I'm not interested in that dynamic. And she was like, you're right. I had had this dream where a house was burning. And the dream said, it's time to go. And I didn't want that to be true. I don't want to go. And when she tells the story, she's like, here's this guy that I'd always wanted to meet who's mindful and thoughtful and cares about his own growth and my growth. And now I can't have him. Like what kind of cruel punishment is this?

And so there was resistance to the leaving. So that dream haunted, I would say, the unconscious of our relationship, because here I am in a relationship with someone who had a dream that she might go who's still processing whether she needs to or not so i can't fully release or surrender into the relationship and she's still trying to negotiate what's wrong with her that she had the dream for someone who related more to the anxious attachment style that must have been the most triggering thing in the world to have someone in front of you who for whatever reason is demonstrating that they're unsure about the relationship or you or whatever it may be and that they are like semi in semi out how did that like did that send you into any kind of a like tailspin of old patterns or control or jealousy or or just how did that trigger you and what did you do about that

because i can just imagine that being like literally the worst possible thing that could inflame that in you yeah if you want to be centered right in your wound to somebody who's ambivalent when you're anxiously attached, you could tell I hadn't yet learned how to move out of that. And you know, in the language, they call it earn secure, I hadn't learned how to become secure yet. And as much as my mind understood, okay, well, logically, I know the way out of this, right? Like, logically, I know it's to have all these conversations. But what I felt was, and I learned this through that relationship, when I started to do work on my nervous system and really understanding my nervous system.

And I had just this immense amount of grief. I remember we were in a psychotherapy couple session and I remember just starting to cry because I had this recognition that somewhere in my life I learned that it was okay to stay in relational dynamics where I wasn't being fully chosen and it was actually and she was in the room with me and and she started to cry too because she realized like by neither of us really actually choosing ourselves, we were staying in this, in this, I mean, really punishing space, as you're saying, like, for an anxiously attached person, that is a special kind of hell. Yeah. And it was, you know, when you talk about codependence, could you just explain because it's a word that gets

thrown around a lot. And you've touched on it a little bit there. But I'm just curious, could you just explain what codependence actually means and how that manifested? Is it just, you know, someone who maybe identifies more as being avoidant and someone who's more anxious and then coming together and kind of trying to, to make something work through that? Is that is that what it is? Or we define codependency in the book as any relational dynamic where we source safety from something or someone at the expense of our needs our sense of self and our overall well-being now the the real key words there are at the expense of and you know when i think about most people we tend to not use our voice. We tend to not stand in our needs, our wants, our values. And, you know, who hasn't experienced, well, maybe really secure people, but the majority of the population who hasn't experienced this idea of compromising yourself in order to maintain connection. And that's such a regular conversation that I have with people is like, I'm going to give up my dreams, my desires, even my need for true safety in order to keep someone in my life or to have anybody in my life.

When you are stuck in that kind of dynamic, what happens is you're using your weapon and your defenses in order to make yourself feel safe. So, you know, if you're using your weapon and your defenses in order to make yourself feel safe so you know if you're anxiously attached it might be like I'm going to please the person I'm with so that they love me forever you've touched on this earlier you know this idea of making yourself indispensable if I can just be perfect and never cause any problems never stand up for myself never show any needs that could possibly conflict with what this person wants and then I'll be safe in that relationship because they'll never want to let me

go and that's a way for us to make ourselves feel safe how do you start to even put those weapons down and take the big leap of faith that is I'm gonna actually stand up for myself in that moment I'm gonna take a risk I'm gonna do something different even a little bit different because that's so scary when you're in it's like a physiological response right what you have you're like I cannot I can't do that because if they if I do that then they'll leave me and if they leave me I'll die that's literally how it feels right so how do you even begin to do that yeah such a big leap to ask of someone to go from like never being able to share how you truly feel and feeling that coming up in your chest in your throat you go into freeze and then you're like oh just start sharing how you

feel like we'd all be doing that if we if it was that simple. And, you know, really, it is there's a few layers to it. I think the first part is that we have to understand where it comes from. I don't think you need to know where every challenge comes from in order to know that you have a behavior or something that you want to change. But what what context offers is compassion. Because really, let's say I'm someone who's hyper vigilant, and I'm like constantly monitoring the environment, or I'm constantly intuiting other people's needs. It's likely because as a kid, I knew that if mom was calm, or dad was calm, I'm safe. Or like, if I can take care of this, my little brother and my little sister, then the my mom won't get overwhelmed. Or, you know, if you have a parent who wasn't even around,

then you become needless and want less. So it's like by just giving context to it, then there's compassion to say like, hey, it's exactly what you actually needed to do to get here. Because I will often hear someone say to me, like, I can't believe I do that about some behavior that is unhelpful or unhealthy relationally. And my response is

always, how could you not? Like, how could you not develop the perfect behavior in order to survive? That's exactly why you are a mammal that needed to develop that. So when we have compassion for it, then there's no longer shame about it. Like it starts to dissolve the shame because you realize it's not your choice. And so but now you're in a state where you have choice, you're an adult, and we have to start to actually move into behaviors that allow us to create connection to like cultivate vulnerability and openness. We also have to look at what is the benefit we get from the behavior? You know, like, what is this, you know from the behavior you know like what is this you know secondary gain that comes from it and that one can be a little harder because i think the challenge that we have

when we recognize that let's say we play the martyr or play the victim is we think that in order to move into a state of choice we have to negate our experience of being a victim but that's not what is actually required, because you could say, like, I have so much compassion for this thing that happened in my life or my childhood. And people really do experience victimization. So I might not have had a choice in this experience. But I now have a choice in how I process it or what I make it mean. So to start to move from like, hey, I recognize this behavior isn't helpful, which is really getting right with reality. Who am I? How do I show up to

relationship? What do I choose? Like these are such important truths to just come to. Because when you can't change anything that you don't accept as true, right? Because then you're not even dealing with reality and when most of our life was spent not looking at the thing and now we're being asked to look at the thing the other layer of that is that i really think it requires from like a nervous system perspective the ability to be both internally resourced like to have um skills to be able to be with feelings you know which you develop over time. That's not something that just happens.

And the other one is externally resourced. So like people, community. I think of all the things we go through in our lives that we try to navigate alone when we really need people to be like, hey, you're not meant to carry that alone. Getting to that truth that you talked about where you accept the reality that there is something that i'm not responsible for originally but that i have to be accountable

for going forward if i want to change my experience of this life getting to that place of truth it can be really hard for people when the way they're being isn't producing quite enough pain like it's like yeah the pain reaches a threshold sometimes where it's like i just something has to change because i can't do this anymore. But often we've learned a way to be functional and get enough of our needs met within our way of being that we never reach that kind of crescendo of pain that forces the truth. What can people do if they've not reached that threshold of pain? How can they not have their entire life have to fall apart to have to confront truth in that way man i wish that i could say it never takes that sort of cosmic two by four but it usually does till it doesn't you know like i know that for the first moments for me to wake

up to just start to ask questions like why do i I do what I do? It actually took, you know, an emotional rock bottom. And I think we think of rock bottoms as being like someone who, you know, drinks too much and wakes up in the wrong place. But it's really any moment where you recognize that the choice you're making is not in alignment with who you want to be. And so, you know, Gabor Mate has that great inquiry where people say like, why the addiction? That's the wrong question. It's why the pain? And I think so much of the things we source in our lives and it's entirely, it's the most

monetizable thing is your misalignment. Like you not being in alignment with truth and who you are and what you want to create, dating people who are not aligned, in relationships having toxic behaviors all these are like they're just like the best opportunity for tiktok and instagram right to just like don't pay attention to don't pay attention to it and our world is really designed for you not to go deep within that and that's why i see like see that as an act of rebellion then that you get to actually go within and see you know the very thing that we avoid is the very thing that is like the the pain that we avoid relationally is also where love lives and so that's actually the really strange paradox it's like i don't want to walk

towards commitment because i'm afraid that if i you know it might show up as i'm just afraid of commitment but you're really afraid of where commitment leads. When Kylie and I, my wife and I broke up from relationship 1.0, it was the first time I'd ever gone through a breakup sober. And I wasn't just processing our breakup. I was processing every breakup. I was processing everything I hadn't sat with. I was terrified of grief. And I started to see that grief was just evidence of the amount I loved. And every time you love somebody,

you're signing up at the exact same time for how much it's going to hurt to lose them. And so it's like, could I build this capacity to hold this? Because I was experiencing it in every moment I opened to her anyways. And instead of trying to run from it, could I actually cultivate an understanding of how to be with it? And here I am for my whole life being told that, like, if you're sad, there's something wrong with you. If you're anxious, there's something wrong with you. We've been told that negative emotion is an indication of a problem within the person.

As opposed to, if your environment is not healthy, if the relationship you're in is not aligned, the negative emotion you have is the exact appropriate response to the circumstances. If I'm listening to this podcast and what I'm hearing, just to paraphrase, is basically when you start choosing better things in your life and for yourself you have to make peace with the fact that you had the choice before and you were choosing the wrong things even if you were doing so unconsciously i feel like there's a lot of people especially people who have suffered through trauma and abuse and who have really suffered at the hands of other people and you know very malignant people there are people who will hear that and say but i didn't

choose it because especially when we talk about those like nervous system responses and the way that you know our attachment styles and the way that we our physiology very much dictates how we feel, behave and, you know, perceive the world and other people. It can really feel out of our control. I know I've been in so many times in my life where I have felt utterly out of control of my emotions and just honestly just thought there is something wrong with me. There is something deeply wrong with me. And I just know so many people will be thinking that right and although I agree with you and there's a radical acceptance and a radical ownership I think that needs to happen and it's actually a very beautiful thing when you can get there but what do you say to people who kind of

will push back on that and say but that's not true because I'm not I didn't choose what happened to me in my childhood I didn't choose what happened to me in my childhood. I didn't choose what happened to me in these relationships. I don't, I'm not even in control of how I feel and how can I possibly be responsible for the hardship in my life? Yeah. I mean, I want to absolutely validate that someone's experience that is a trauma is not something they choose because we can't change what's occurred in our lives we have to change how we orient to what occurred because if all of a sudden the traumas i've experienced in my life and i i want to make sure everyone knows like i'm not minimizing someone's experience of trauma

but rather saying that if i made that experience mean that i'm broken or i'm not enough or that um i'm not powerful that i can just through the use of how i see the circumstances and that's why when we say like it didn't happen to you it happened for you well that really minimizes it's like but it did happen to you but how do we actually just hold this complexity of saying it did happen to you and how can it happen for you? Like, how can it be a service? So because we live in these worlds of binaries that is like, well, if you say it happened for you, then now we're minimizing the experience of the victimization. I'm saying actually live in both worlds because both exist, which is like, it's the same. If I minimize this, then it's not valuable anymore. And that we want to actually cultivate the value from it.

You know, when people look for the meaning in something and they say it happened for a reason, I always struggled with that because it felt insulting at the more superficial end of the spectrum and in the worst cases of abuse it felt like almost a spiteful thing to say insulting yeah like the the you know it happened for a reason like when you consider some of the things you're talking about when we say it happened for a reason

you're like are you joking but what i what i love about what you just said which is really an important uh distinction is it happened to you and you get to make it happen for you as well you get to choose like i think much more important than finding a meaning is creating a meaning right that's great so if someone is in that place and they want to create the meaning and they want to start to choose put intention behind different choices can you talk about practically what you did to to do that because there are times when i've been triggered where i'm so you know i can physiologically feel it through my whole body i and the idea of choosing something different than i want to do in that moment is it just feels borderline impossible so how did you learn to start to regulate your nervous system?

Because I believe, and I'm curious if this is where you've landed too, but I believe that regulating our nervous system is what starts to create freedom in choices. But people just don't even know what that means or how to do that. So I'm curious as to whether that's where you landed too, but also what, how did you do that practically? Like, is there, could you give us like a literal play by play of like, okay, I got triggered. I worked with a somatic therapist. So that was a really powerful shift for me. But I'd say initially, like, I remember my wife and I early in our relationship getting into a conflict and both of us laying in the bed

and just being like I had so many words I wanted to say and they were like like I just couldn't get them out and it started to I started to courageously just try to put a few words out I was lucky and I know you guys talk about this in your own relationship dynamic. I was, the gift of my wife and our relationship is that they were then received. And so I was starting to repattern what I thought would happen if I share my voice, because I was getting different evidence of what actually was going to happen. And so I didn't, there's, I think like the, the most powerful or most courageous act is the first time because there's no evidence. And so it is like this leap into the complete unknown. And, and that's why boundaries or self-expression have a symbiotic relationship with self-worth.

But the first time you ever lay a boundary, there might be no self worth at the basis of that. So it's when you lay a boundary or express yourself, you're saying I matter. And then it feeds I matter. And then now the behavior reinforces the belief I can remember a time when I was in a relationship and I said something that was it took a moment of bravery to say it. It was something I was actually intensely worried would make me unattractive if I said it. And then unfortunately,

that person literally said to me, that was really unattractive. Like it validated it. And I'm curious what you- It wasn't me, by the way. It wasn't Audrey. But I'm curious as to what you would say to some, when someone says,

I, you know, it's so lovely for you that your wife, was she your wife at the time? Well, this was girlfriend. You know, the way she responded was corrective for you. What do you say to people who assert a boundary or express themselves? And, you know, it validates all of their fears and it's not corrective it's to encourage them to keep going well i would say that for people

when you're expressed because certainly not all my boundaries in my life have been received from like a positive affirmative perspective is that when you lay a boundary, the success of the boundary is not in the affirmation of the person receiving it. Often a person receiving a boundary will be resistant to the boundary, you know? So my advice to people is always to start to see that the, the victory is actually in the process of laying it. So boundaries are really negotiations too, you know, like there are lines in the sand there. it. So boundaries are really negotiations too. You know, like there are lines in the sand there. Sometimes they start as walls, you know, they start as, um, ultimatums because we just don't know, like, I need to actually assert a bigger space around me

because I don't know how to negotiate yet. I don't know how to have a need and you have a need and us somehow find compromise when we're not calibrate it exactly and so it that starts to create nervous system regulation because you're starting to recognize that you have choice in what you're agreeing to relate to and sometimes you know there are people there are people in relationships whose whose trauma or insecurity or it, it can actually make them, you know, demand more than is reasonable, right?

Like you can imagine a scenario where someone is demanding, you know, someone goes on a work trip and they want them to give them a call on the hour, every hour, right? We can imagine a scenario where it's like, actually,

that's not a fair thing to do to your partner. I can imagine a scenario where it's like actually that's not a fair thing to do to your partner i can imagine a scenario where a person is telling their partner it makes me really insecure when you wear that outfit so you're not allowed to wear those outfits when you go out because it makes me feel bad like we can see these scenarios where it would very obviously move from an appropriate boundary to have and a very human and understandable one to oh that's now a mutation where it's gone too far what do you say to people who don't know where they are on that line and not only don't know how to calibrate but they don't even know if what they're asking for in the first place is reasonable and therefore making them a less viable partner for

someone. I think it's great to be able to reflect it like the boundaries are the things you're hoping to start to ask for stand in to reflect it off friends, to reflect it off trusted people. You know, the people who usually are telling us to assert our worth are the people who we push away when we're not valuing ourselves. You know, like the friend who actually tells us the truth. But that example you gave about, let's say someone saying, I need you to call me every hour. If I know that that person, if I'm in relationship with them, and I know that that's probably coming from a previous relationship where there was betrayal, what I might say to them is, hey, look, I understand that you have a hard time trusting. I'm not the one who earned the lack of trust, but I'd like to participate in your healing of it.

That's not a reasonable request for me, but what is reasonable is, I'll check in with you at the end of the night. And is there anything else I can do that is coming up for you? Now, I would say if we're in repeated patterns with people who are unavailable, things like that, then we still need to experience those frustrations

and those pains, like me being with my wife, and at the time girlfriend, who didn't fully choose me, was exactly what I needed to experience to hit a place where I finally got to a place where it was no more. And so for people who are looking to say like, well, how do I know if my boundaries are walls? Well, a great way to check in is like,

are my standards so high that I actually use it as a way so no one can get close. We'll start to get an intuitive feeling like, yeah, maybe that is true. And when we're starting to assert boundaries, we might get it wrong. That's why I said there, they are negotiations in some sense, because I might express a boundary, like to my my wife you need to call me every hour but her feedback on that is actually starting for me to recognize um even in the conversation there would be healing i know for me i struggled in my life and i'm still working on it to pay attention to how something is actually making me feel and getting in touch with that because when we're in that state and someone's not choosing us especially if we're coming from an anxious mindset our brain just goes straight to how do i secure this person yeah exactly it doesn't go to

this really doesn't make me feel good so why do i keep choosing a situation that doesn't make me feel good that right that for many people is a far less even though it seems so obvious, like why would I stay somewhere? I'm not happy, but it's a far less natural place to go than they are not sure about me. How do I make them sure about me? There's two questions we're always asking relationally. Am I safe? And then the second one is, am I safe to be me? But the first one is safety. And really what we're saying is like, let's cultivate and create a space between two people, which takes two people who are conscious of what they want to create. I know

you guys talk about like being intentional about what you're creating. So many of us enter relationships and choose other people's vows, you know, and really the reason relationships end is because they don't have clear agreements at the beginning so it's like what are we generating through this connection what are we bringing to life i really think it's ironic or crazy that when we get out of relationships all of a sudden we do everything we love we now pursue our dreams in a way to like get back at them you know like look at who i became i get a revenge body i get whatever and i don't really

care what makes someone fully step into their potential in themselves. But I think like, why is that not what we use a relationship for? Like when we're concerned about having the upper hand, we're already in the wrong conversation because what's happening is we're playing off power dynamics. And as soon as you're doing that, you're in control and manipulation and you're actually operating from fear. But when I think about my wife becoming more powerful, more, her voice getting more clear, I just think about how hot that is. One, I'm also going to get more feedback. I'm not as excited about that, but that means that I'm going to grow. And when she becomes more powerful, the relationship becomes more powerful. I do. Because like, let's be honest, two people walking through life is more powerful than one.

Because not only is two perspectives more powerful, but two curiosities, two ways of seeing the world. Diversity in every aspect of the world improves the world. And why not use our relationship as the way that we come fully alive and actually cultivate safety? You took a break, a sacred break. Is that right? Yeah, it becomes sacred when you get back together.

Got it. Yeah. So there was a sacred break and then you guys got back together after a year? 10 months. 10 months i'm so curious about this because it just feels like the validation that that must give so many people who absolutely should not pine after an x yeah yeah the mandate it gives them to continue to pine is really scary to me. So how, when you're getting those questions from people about, you know, they're looking for that.

Yeah, you broke up with this person or you two broke up and then you ended up and she wasn't sure about you. But now she's so sure and you're married and you have this unbelievably conscious relationship it's like in some ways the most dangerous story imaginable because because by the way how many people uh have the exact story of someone broke up with me because they weren't sure about me or because they weren't all in and you know the idea that i could be in something as intentional and as conscious as you're in with your wife now, with the starting point being they're not sure about me, is so potent as a story. So how do you steer people away from using that story as a justification to continue giving so much

of their time and energy for something that ultimately will never be or should never be my number one priority when we broke up was healing and that was I didn't I cared about her feelings I cared that yeah you know we wouldn't interact but I care more about my feelings. I cared that we wouldn't interact. But I cared more about my feelings and my healing than her experience of me muting her on social media. And because we were able to communicate, I did say, listen, I'm going to mute you. I'm not going to interact with you.

I'm going to not, we're going to have no contact. And here's the rules of that. And we agreed on that. And that was hard, but it was necessary. And I also will say to people when they ask that i'm like are you using this as an excuse to go back towards someone who is actually toxic and you're you know because for a lot of people who are used to chasing the healing that is being invited is can you get to a place where you're you're actually doing the

opposite of what your normal pattern is? And I realized because Kylie was more likely to be avoidant in our dynamic, is that I would always want her to come towards me. But as an anxious person, I always took the space up that she needed to move towards. And I think more of attachment styles that anxiety is really about not being comfortable with space and avoidance is about needing space. So it's really our relationship to space that's happening. It just happens to be the space between two people. And so when I think about what we created in that time apart, Kylie did what she called a man talks. So she like, again, had no engagement with anybody, no conversations,

nothing. And that allowed her to discover her voice to heal a lot of generational stuff one thing that had come up in our relationship dynamic was that in her own family lineage she'd never seen a woman stand on her own two feet that they were always provided for you know maybe be the stay-at-home mom whatever it might be and because of that she had experienced what happens when that happens is that women tend to compromise their voice but anybody in that dynamic might harriet learner who's a psychologist she talks about how um if you're not free to come and go from a relationship you won't feel feel free to be yourself in a relationship. Because if being yourself jeopardizes the relationship,

it jeopardizes your survival. And so when it's about reuniting, for me, the main thing always is how do you use the breakup or the ending or the space as the way to fully step into your potential? Because what you inevitably find when someone steps fully into their potential and starts to go after everything they've always wanted,

give birth to everything, and like really assert, is that they stop thinking about it. It doesn't become a need anymore. Because if I change in order to get someone, if I don't get them, the change goes out the window. But if I change because I want to become the type of person that creates the type of relationship I desire, then now I'm attached to a purpose that's greater than anything. And it's not attached to a person. It's attached to a sense of self.

How do you do that if you have an abandonment wound? Right? Because a lot of the reasons people don't want to let go is because letting go is so scary. Well, I think for people to recognize that we tend to be drawn towards people who wound us in a similar way as we're familiar with. So like if I'm if I as a kid, I didn't feel attended to, I'll likely be drawn towards people who do not fully show up for me, who may be long distance relationships. If I was overwhelmed, I might choose someone who's controlling, who's smothering. And so we tend to be drawn towards people who are really, what we're unconsciously trying to do is resolve an unhealed childhood experience. The strange paradox that I see when

someone is terrified of being rejected, and then we talk in the book about the masks that different people that we wear, and we might wear more than one, that are adaptive strategies so that we can get our needs met, so that we can avoid pain, so we can avoid reliving relational experiences. So if I am presenting a version of myself in order to get you to like me, and I'm afraid that you're gonna reject me, the very act of what I'm doing is actually rejecting myself. So I live in the wound.

I live in the constant perpetuation of it, and I reinforce the story that I can't be who I actually am. And even this overt fear of abandonment that causes us to cling to something, what we're really trying to do is control the unfolding of time, right? Like I'm trying to like use this clinging to not be in, as you were talking about the unknown, because if I let that go, then all of a sudden now I have to be with my abandonment. But what is so deeper on the level of how we're showing up for ourselves

is that we are constantly living in a state of abandoning our own story. And so when we can get with that truth of like, wait, the very thing I'm afraid of creating is the very thing I'm always living in, oh my God, what the hell am I doing? And when we can see that and be with the pain of that and we're like why would we want to create that and you know we were talking before about taking

the experiences you've been in and then invalidating their pain but then actually somehow allowing them to serve you right and one exercise that i like people to do is they write out the timeline of their life, all the sticky moments that they have in their life. And they might draw that in a left column. And then in the column next, they write out what is the belief they created about themselves because of that experience. And then in the next column, they write, what is the wisdom that I could bring into my life

through this experience? And what they do is they then tear off the belief and the experience and burn it and they keep the wisdom i like the idea of ritual because ritual is also what we really if you think like evolutionarily we were always in ceremony and ritual and this allows us to actually have this visceral experience of burning up what we've been holding on to for those that don't know mark made the decision very recently to get off of Instagram was it delete your account or just to get off of it delete or

deactivate deactivate so you know I feel like that's you really putting your money where your mouth is in terms of the intentionality you know you said that you reached a point in your relationship with your girlfriend at the time where you you know you realize this is not good for me like it's i i can't be in a relationship with someone who's not sure about me and you made the hard decision to leave if you know it feels like there's something analogous to this relationship that you've had with instagram which i don't think is a you thing i think think it's for sure the thing, something the rest of us feel to, um, everything you've said today to me, that's like you being very intentional about living it.

So I'd just love to ask you, even if it's just for a couple of minutes, how that feels. You know, I've been wrestling with my relationship with it for a while and the reason that is is that um one i really built the majority of my business on the platform and now i'm really recognizing the statement that you build a mansion in someone else's backyard you know i can hold the beauty that i've reached so many lives and i mean i met my wife on instagram so like it's a like, there's a both and. I've had such an awesome opportunity to pursue what I love and really grow and learn so much. I've been on there since, I believe it's December of 2013.

So it's been a while. But like anything, I think the intention behind a social media platform and especially Meta has changed a lot you know it's if they make me they make money from the attention of people because they can show more ads to people so naturally what they reward through an algorithm is that they desire only a certain type of content and if you don't create that content you don't get reach so naturally a creator generally will start to curate their content to achieve that so they start to depart from their authentic art and self-expression and and really it starts to devalue art in a way now I was interviewing Stephen

Porges the other day who is the creator of polyvagal theory so about the nervous system and he was saying that we spend the creator of polyvagal theory so about the nervous system and he was saying that we spend the majority of our lives being evaluated like in school and all these types of things and when the nervous system when you're constantly being evaluated you're vigilant you're like constantly on the defense and i was thinking like not only right like not only are we being evaluated constantly on social media by people, we're actually being evaluated by an algorithm. And the problem which he referenced is that in a normal relationship or a healthy one, there is a feedback loop that you can express how the thing is making you feel, how the relationship is making you feel, how constantly needing to create more and it's never enough. And the thing about the algorithm is it's always a mystery you'll never find out what it is you're always

on eggshells if you say the wrong thing they can take it all away and he was saying that because there's no feedback loop there's no opportunity for the other side of the relationship to change and it really has no interest in changing i love the idea that like it's being on instagram is essentially being in a relationship with a narcissist exactly and i started to make these parallels and what are you saying about mark zuchbach but what i do think is was really powerful i was in a brand strategy meeting with my friend and I was talking about my book and I was realizing that what was coming up with so much dissonance is I couldn't be in the relationship that I have with my wife and write and speak about a book that's about liberation and then be not liberated. Like I'm consenting to a relationship. I'm not a victim of Instagram or

meta circumstances. I've consented to it, but now I have the consciousness and the awareness that it's actually not in service of my wellbeing. I'm not saying other people can't have a healthy relationship to these things, although I'm not sure that they're designed to even be able to do that. So how do I feel in the middle? That's a great question. There's a lot of trepidation a lot of fear because so much um i want to say one part of it is like identity because you know a lot of the times when you're pitching like a brand or a conversation uh they're like well how big is the social media falling so who am i without the social validation uh of of that my work is credible through the following that I have

and I'm like wow look at what we've really uh minimized value to yeah and and so there's that fear of like who am I without that and then also what will I do like how will I generate um income how will I take care of my employees like there's a lot of uncertainty in all of it but what I've learned throughout my life is that that alignment is more important than anything you know that like to be in integrity with what is true for me is I'd burn it all to the ground, you know, for that. Now that I have a son, it's like completely changed the level of responsibility that comes with like with the choices I'm making in my life, you know, because I want my son to be able to look at his father's life.

One, he can listen to my podcast, which is wild to think about but two that that like did i do and and act in a way that was in alignment with what i said i stood for and i don't do that as some sort of like oh look at me i'm i think i saw this funny reel that is like everybody when they leave instagram and it's a it was really funny the guys like dancing in the street like other people like you might be able to handle this but i'm enlightened and i'm gonna go dance with roses and trees uh i might do that but it's not a it's not a hierarchical thing it's more just like my body my wife refers to it that the body is the somatic canary in the coal mine and my body has really been saying, um, it's, it just doesn't feel healthy. It's inspiring, man.

Yeah, for sure. It's inspiring. And we've been saying recently, I think Audrey was the one who first said it, that, you know, love, when we talk to people in their love lives, love needs space. And if you are constantly attached to an unhealthy relationship or if you're constantly i call it micro dosing on some person that you know isn't really even in your life but you keep giving them your time and attention and texting them or hooking up with them you never really create the space for something amazing to happen with someone who's right and uh it kind of feels like from the

outside that this is this is creating space for you and i'm going to be super interested to see what comes out of that space for you i think about how much uh of our life force and energy we put into things that are not aligned or crazy right and because it's so normalized that we do that, that maybe in our childhood we learned to bypass alarms, red flags, orange flags, and what will I do when my consciousness is not thinking about what is Instagram doing? What does it need from me?

What is meta? Is that working working is it not i'm like oh my god i can actually just create yeah and it already has um enlivened me in a way that i think because i made a choice and then the choice is now it's done it's happening that now i'm like oh okay there's certainty there's no much there's no ambivalence you know so i think it's so ironic in our lives that we're constantly brought back to different layers of our healing.

And I see now that even I've been in ambivalence for four years, and of course I'm gonna have anxiety because if you don't make choices, you're not directing your life. And that's gonna show up as anxiety because you can't trust yourself. So here's to trusting. This has been such an amazing conversation.

Yeah, I could talk to you for another two hours. Yeah, I've absolutely loved it. I don't think anyone is going to need any encouragement to go and get a copy of your new book. It is called liberated love release codependent patterns and create the love you desire. And it's by Mark Groves who has been sat across from us having this wonderful conversation and his wife,

wife, Kylie Macbeth. Congratulations to the both of you for creating something so wonderful together and let's do this again because this was a pleasure I'm so grateful and I've really enjoyed this conversation and to the people watching listening for trading your time and that's something that I don't take for granted and trusting me with with this conversation where should people go for the book and is there a specific site or where do you want should people go for the book? And is there a specific site

or where do you want people to go for both the book and your work? You can go to createthelove.com slash liberated love and you can get the book from any retailer there. And on there, if you put in the receipt, you can get a meditation we created for it, a workbook and yeah, lots of other goodies.

Amazing. Yeah. And you can just go to markgroves.com and for my work moving forward i'll i have a podcast which you're a guest on um and and also on youtube where can people find the podcast mark gro you man we'll see you soon thank you you