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Hey, everybody.
It's Meredith on our off week with a gift.
Today I want to share an episode of a show that thoughtfully explores the big questions of life meaning and how we connect to each other.
It's the Signal Award-winning podcast.
No Small Endeavor from our friends at Great Feeling Studios and PRX.
Hosted by Lisi Camp, No Small Endeavor invites listeners into deep conversations with leading thinkers, artists and scholars about how we can cultivate a life that is rich in wisdom, justice and hope.
It's a podcast that challenges and inspires, offering thoughtful dialogue on life's most profound questions.
In this episode, Lee sits down with Dr Alexandra Solomon, a renowned relationship expert, professor and therapist, to explore the complexities of love, relationships and self-awareness.
They explore the concept of relational self-awareness how understanding ourselves more deeply can lead to healthier and more fulfilling relationships.
Dr Solomon shares insights on navigating conflict, fostering intimacy and approaching love with curiosity and intentionality.
It's a conversation filled with wisdom and practical takeaways that will leave you thinking about your own relationships in a new way.
Before we dive into the full episode, be sure to follow No Small Endeavor on your favorite podcast app.
Here's the episode.
I'm Lee C. Camp, and this is No Small Endeavor, exploring what it means to live a good life.
We grow up on a steady diet of romance and romantic ideas.
That's Alexandra Solomon, psychologist, author, and an expert on relationships.
She's dispelling the myth that love should be easy.
And if love is difficult, then that means something's wrong.
Today she does a deep dive into why healthy intimate relationships are crucial to human flourishing and offers a new lens for understanding our friendships and marriages.
Intimate partnerships It's tumultuous and confusing.
And of course, we then need some skills and some faith and some space for mystery and paradox.
Compassion gets us so much further with the people in our lives than anything else.
All coming right up.
I'm Lee Seacamp.
This is No Small Endeavor, exploring what it means to live a good life.
With Valentine's Day this month, there will be no shortage of opportunities to revisit the romantic myth or to come under the sway of the marketer's great commodification of love.
And look, I'm a fan of flowers and good meals and chocolate and sex when, as the moral philosophers put it, those goods are rightfully ordered.
But our guest today comes at love from a different angle, that one of the most important aspects of romantic relationships is working on ourselves.
Dr Alexandra Solomon is a licensed clinical psychologist lecturer at Northwestern University and an internationally renowned expert on relationships.
She hosts the podcast Reimagining Love and we had a great conversation about her book Loving Bravely.
While it might be tempting to think about her approach as akin to eating broccoli that you don't like because you know it's good for you, I'd suggest that you might just find that the sex, chocolate meals and romance are, in fact, all the better, even more so rightfully ordered when you do much of the work the doctor prescribes here.
Here's dr alexandra solomon.
Welcome, alexandra.
Thank you for having me.
Lee yeah, delighted to have you with us.
As i was um looking at your bio as a relationship expert, i started thinking about how one of the perennial pitfalls for those of us in theology and or ministry is that you know, when you have something called a masters of divinity or you have a phd in theology, you're supposed to have answers, And you're also tempted to hide the ways.
You are so screwed up, like everybody else, you know.
And so I wonder man, this must be pretty high pressure in your relationships to be the relationship expert.
So how does that work?
You know, we, so my husband, I've been married for 26 years.
My husband's name is Todd.
And I've had him as a guest on my podcast a couple of times.
And we call them the Toddcasts.
First time he was on the Todd cast.
I gather audience questions and one of the questions was, like I want to know from Todd what's it like to be married to a relationship expert?
He goes, the thing you need to know is she puts on her yoga pants one leg at a time.
You know, the difference is that when I do all the things that I teach my couples not to do, I have that running commentary in my head of like you've got to be kidding me.
Don't say that.
Oh, my God, you just said it.
You know darn well that's not the thing to say.
Well, how do you see the work that you've done and the research that you've done, the teaching, the writing?
How do you see that flowing out of your own autobiography?
Yeah, I'm the oldest daughter here in a blended family system that has known all kinds of struggle over the years.
And I think when I was little I felt really yoked and responsible for the big people's happiness and wellbeing.
And I felt confused and overwhelmed a lot of the time about what I was seeing and noticing and feeling.
And at the same time, my safe place was my bedroom.
So I developed a thing called preventative homework, where I would get my homework done.
And then I would just, you know, think like, what else might come up in the day?
So I've been always voracious about knowledge and scholarship, both as I think you know part of who I am, but also as a coping strategy.
And so I just relationship knowledge.
You know I would listen to Dr Ruth on Sunday nights with my walkman under my blankets, like what is this whole world?
And was a huge fan of Oprah and Phil Donahue and all those shows from the beginning.
So then when I got to college, I was like, wait a minute, you can make a life of this?
And I do, I think a lot.
I put my hand right here on my heart a lot.
And I think about how the young version of me gets to rest now, because now I'm this empowered woman and I have knowledge and I have experience and I can be helpful to people in a way that when I was little I just couldn't be.
So for sure I have.
You know, my mission and my healing and my nerdiness have flown together in ways that are just fit really well for me.
Yeah, it's lovely that you have found your way into that beautiful space.
I mentioned to you before we started today, but as I read your book Loving Bravely, I was thinking back to my lovely wife, Laura and I have been married well over 30 years now.
And we were young and naive and very ignorant of what it meant to be married.
You know, when we got married, we were kids, you know, I was 23, she was 21.
And then we subsequently, we've done a lot of work on learning to live together well and learning to love each other well.
And we've done, I don't know, three or four different seasons of marriage therapy.
And we've read a lot.
We've worked a lot.
We've learned a lot from the recovery world.
And so it's just been very rich.
And as I was reading through your book, I thought oh my goodness, this is like a compendium of the stuff that we spent years learning in therapy.
And so it's just a super helpful book.
And I really thank you for the book and all that you've shared with folks.
That makes this so rich to help people get into relationships.
Thank you.
You know, Loving Bravely came out in 2017.
I've since written two other books.
And that is you know, when I first became an author, That was the thing that blew me away was the number of people who said where was this book when I was 20 or 25, or when I was first dating, when I was first married?
And we don't value relationship and sexuality education, even though we are now.
We're all alive in a time when the relationship science is rich, abundant.
It is couple therapy, relationship science.
These are mature scholarly fields.
We know the stuff that makes a thriving intimate partnership, yet we don't teach it to young people.
It's why I love teaching at Northwestern the undergraduate marriage class that I teach there, which is really basically a journey into themselves and helping them know themselves more deeply.
But you're right.
So many of us kind of fumble through and flame out and learn lots of stuff the hard way.
And I think even if we did, even if somebody did have a really robust relationship and sexuality education at 19 20 21, you still don't know how to be a married 35-year-old or a married 55-year-old.
So we do have to be these forever students, I think, of ourselves, of our partner, of relationships.
Yeah, to me it's a lifelong journey, I'm sure, for you, even though you guys, you've been at it for decades.
But you don't know Laura in this moment of her life.
You've got to get to know her at this moment.
Yeah, that lovely idea of continued curiosity about who your partner is becoming, I think has been very helpful to me.
You said that in early on in the book you say, quote we assume that people ought to just know how to do love.
And that's a huge problem.
And then you ask why didn't I put the same due diligence into learning how to do love as I did into learning how to drive?
Which I thought was super helpful, but unpack that a little bit for us.
Yeah.
You know, I have this thing I say now, Disney did us dirty.
You know, it's like we grow up on a steady diet especially, I think, girls and women a steady diet of romance and romantic ideas about love should be easy.
And if love is difficult... then that means something's wrong.
Something's wrong with you.
Something's wrong with them.
Something's wrong with this relationship, this idea that, if you're my soulmate, I shouldn't even need to translate myself to you.
And so I think that's where a lot of our struggles happen, by just this argument with reality that we get into of like it shouldn't be, like this.
When, in fact, intimate partnership activates the very same deep, strong attachment needs and longings and yearnings that we have when we're babies.
You know, like that depth of craving for safety and connection has been found in the science.
And so we are being activated at incredibly deep levels when we fall in love with a partner, when we become interdependent with somebody else.
So of course, it's tumultuous and confusing.
And of course, we then need some skills and some faith and some space for mystery and paradox.
In my ethics classes of the years I typically would have one lecture on marriage that I would give, And I remember somewhere in that lecture I would say something like I think one of the best things you can do for your future married self and your marriage is to go face your own stuff right now.
Is that good advice?
It's so rock solid.
It's so rock solid.
If I was in that lecture hall, I'd be like, whew, yes, that's it.
That's it.
He's on it.
Yeah, that's, yeah, beautiful.
Yeah.
You use this term relational self-awareness a great deal.
So can you define that for us and tell us how that functions in your work?
I mean, that's that's it.
What you share with your students is relational self-awareness.
OK.
Because it's so darn easy in a romantic relationship.
I could sit here and outline for you, in alphabetical order or in chronological order, all the ways in which Todd Solomon is a real person.
Pain in my you know what.
That's easy.
That's easy.
Being critical of him, saying that he's the one that makes this relationship difficult.
It's so easy to see it in him.
What the harder thing is, is for me to study my own reactivity.
Why?
Why when he made that comment to me, what was disturbing?
It doesn't matter.
And I may go too well.
Four out of five women would find that comment.
It doesn't matter.
It doesn't matter.
What was it about me?
So when we're practicing relational self-awareness, We're guided by what I call the golden equation of love.
My stuff plus your stuff equals our stuff.
Everything that happens in our relationships and our marriages is that choreography, or that pattern or that cycle of something from me and my world and my belief system and my experience and my tender spots is getting all tangled up with something about you and your tender spot and your experience and it's making this dynamic.
We know that we're not honoring relational self-awareness when one of two things is in the room with us either blame or shame.
Because blame is me saying your stuff is the problem here.
If you weren't so X, Y, or Z, we wouldn't have this problem.
Shame is when I feel like my stuff is the problem, my family of origin stuff.
It's my ambition.
That's what the problem is here.
No.
It's my stuff plus your stuff that's equaling our stuff.
Yeah, that's super helpful.
Another person I thought of as I was reading through your work is the therapist, David Schnarch, who's written a lot of fascinating stuff from my perspective.
And a former therapist of mine and now friend of mine introduced me to him.
And I always liked the way, I didn't like it, but I found it helpful when I accepted it.
He talks about how what a lot of people call marriage problems is marriage problems.
And that it's the crucible of those challenges, and it's the crucible of those difficult times that become the most important moments for our growth as human beings.
I think that just revolutionized the way I thought about marriage and the way I thought about my difficulties in marriage.
But I saw at least an analog to that in your insistence or encouragement to see marriage and long-term committed relationships as a classroom of love.
This is where you can really learn to love, right?
Yeah, gosh, I have so much appreciation for David Schnarch's book.
And if that name is new to any listeners, I really encourage you to dig into his material.
He was just made incredible contributions, I think, to our field.
And what I always have loved about the idea of a crucible is this idea of transformation.
You know, like that you are being changed by this experience.
You know, almost like worked by the process of loving somebody.
And I think that's just.
There's something that's so I think, hopeful about that and something really humbling about that.
I rely on it a lot when I'm talking to people who are dating because oftentimes, especially today's younger people are going to live through three four, five love stories.
You know that they're not going to get married at the young ages that you and I were when we got married.
They're going to have these multiple experiences.
And so I tell them like love doesn't leave you where it finds you.
And so to like let yourself be changed by it and to have some grace with yourself for that.
One of my colleagues at Northwestern, Eli Finkel, did some research.
There is an idea in psychology called self-concept clarity, which is like how well do I feel, like I know myself?
And he did a study where he took a sample of people and looked at them across time, knowing that over the course of the study, some of them would go through a breakup, and And what he found, sure enough, was that when people were going through a breakup, their self-concept clarity tanked.
It was like they didn't know who they were anymore.
And when I read that, I was like, okay, that's it.
That fits so well with my sense that relationships change us.
And certainly a divorce or a breakup is one of those who am I, where am I?
So I think we have to have that like depth of appreciation for how relational we are as people, like a relational self.
And I'm not just this like self-contained Alexandra.
I am changing and changed by my relationships, which I imagine there's probably an intersection there with your faith practices too, right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So I'd love to dig into the different parts of of Loving Bravely.
And in this first two parts, you talk a lot about self-reflection and self-awareness.
And I was reminded a few years ago, we had the psychiatrist, Kurt Thompson, on our show.
And he at one point said something like 80 of the time when you're arguing with your spouse, you're actually arguing with your mother or your father.
And you seem at least to be pointing in a similar direction.
That is, we at least need to be aware of the ways in which our early formation of ourself, we bring that into our marriage.
So talk to us some about that.
Yeah.
Yeah, I call that ghost busting that, that I feel like a lot of what I do, like you know, in a couple therapy session.
It's like going slowly enough that we're we're aware of the ghosts in the room and that we're so I think.
OK, so what would I want a listener of yours to know, which is that when we go from calm, open hearted what I believe to be like our natural state of being, you know like kind of just in the flow to tense guarded reactive, activated when that process happens like that's a moment for us to look at what's being stirred up.
And certainly there are lots of times where it is, it's just like our partner is annoying.
They left the dish in the sink again, or they didn't call and they said they were going to call.
But there are times when the size of our reaction feels bigger than the present moment.
I think that's one of our clues here that this moment is being supercharged by something that has to do with our past.
It's like our partner has accidentally tripped this wire.
That is not just the pain of them leaving the dish in the sink, but it activates a really old wound around, feeling like my voice doesn't matter or I'm not taken into consideration or I'm not safe here.
Something that is older and bigger.
How do you go about unearthing those ghosts or unearthing those old patterns that we learned when we were young?
If we notice say, there's this too large or seemingly disproportionate reaction to an episode, how do we then kind of dig beneath that and say, oh well, that may be X, Y or Z from my childhood.
I think a lot of it comes from understanding who you were in your family system growing up, looking at your family system, as I call it, like your original love classroom, because that was the first place that you learned about love.
And I want people to think about two different facets, observation and expectation.
So observation is what did you observe?
How did the big people talk to each other?
Who are women supposed to be in the family?
Who are men supposed to be?
How was disappointment handled?
How was repair handled?
Like what did you observe, right?
You had a front row seat.
Even if your parents weren't married, even if you grew up in a home with a single parent, you watch that single parent navigate relationships with their parents, with their siblings, with their friends.
What did you learn by observing?
Because when we're little, we're sponges and we're taking in all these messages about what you're allowed to ask for, how you ask for things, how you handle anger, et cetera, et cetera.
So reflecting on those observations you made.
And then the second one was the expectations.
Who did you have to be in your family?
A family is a system.
And one of the qualities of a system, whether it's like a pond, like an ecosystem, or a business team or a family.
One of the properties of a system is a system seeks homeostasis.
A system seeks stability and balance.
And so oftentimes, Family systems do that by casting kids into roles.
And when we're little, we become who our parents need us to be.
There's a wonderful teacher in my field, Gabor Mate, who wrote a book called The Myth of Normal, and he's written other books.
And he says, when we're little, we trade authenticity for belonging.
We had to become... who our families needed us to be.
I have actually on my website, a family of origin roles quiz.
I've kind of broken down the roles that we play in our family into six different roles.
And on my podcast.
Now we're digging into all these different roles and looking at what is the wound that emerges when you had to be the perfect one, when you had to be the easy one, when you had to be the peacemaker.
What's the wound you were left with?
And what's the gift you were left with?
It's both of those.
So those are some of the avenues to understanding how the past shows up today.
It's not an excuse.
It's not about throwing your parents under the bus.
It's not about blaming, but it certainly is about contextualizing ourselves and our partners so that we're less confusing to each other.
Listening to No Small Endeavor and our conversation with Dr Alexandra Solomon.
I love hearing from you.
Tell us what you're reading, who you're paying attention to, or send us feedback about today's episode.
You can reach me at lee at nosmallendeavor.com.
You can get show notes for this episode in your podcast app or wherever you listen.
These notes include links to resources mentioned in the episode, as well as a PDF of my complete interview notes and a full transcript.
We would be most appreciative if you would go to your favorite podcast app and and write up a glowing five-star review of No Small Endeavor, because those reviews help extend the reach of the beauty, truth and goodness we are seeking to sow in the world.
Always encouraged to see those.
Thank you for those who've done that, and thank you for those who will.
Coming up.
Alexandra and I talk more about how to create and maintain thriving relationships, discussing things like authenticity, apologizing and self-compassion.
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I'm still ruminating on that quote from your colleague.
When we're young, we trade authenticity for belonging.
Isn't that?
I mean that, just like I still feel the little shivers on my neck when you say it, when you say it back to me.
Yeah, I mean it's a remarkable challenge then.
I think at least two potential implications of that is one as I grow into my own marriage, I want to try to find a way to find my own authenticity and facilitate belonging and to allow my children to be authentic.
That poses all sorts of challenges, right?
Because, as we'll talk about here in a moment, you know the notion of boundaries and so forth.
Always it seems like there's that tension with our children or with our spouses, of of how we want them to be authentic.
And yet, at the same time, there are limits to the way they're going to express their authenticity with me or with us.
So how do you think about being authentic while still holding on to boundaries, or holding on to some sort of expectation of moral formation in our children or in one another?
Or in ourselves.
Or in ourselves, yes. to Todd Solomon and then say, I'm just being authentic.
You know, that doesn't work.
It's not a free pass.
You know to say these are just my feelings or this is just me being authentic.
So there is, right.
I think that is the challenge or the tension.
To me, authenticity is less a kind of like fixed state and more noticing.
I'm biting my tongue, figuring out what I'd like to say and how to say it, in a way that's gonna pull you closer to me rather than push you further away.
And often that has to do with tone and timing, but it also has to do with me being willing to say Lee, I've got something I'm sitting with and I don't know yet what it means, but will you look at it with me?
Rather than me saying Lee, you shouldn't have done that and that doesn't make any sense and anybody knows that's not the way to do it.
I think that's the difference.
Like can I bring you something that's not fully formed and that is brought to you in a way that we can sit side by side with each other and look at the thing together?
Another quote from your book that came to mind a moment ago when you're talking is he had this great line about say what you mean, mean what you say, but don't say it mean.
I've never heard that last part.
Don't say it mean.
So where did that come from?
Oh, yeah.
This is a really cool therapist that I met along the way who was really helpful to me and to my family.
And it was something that she had picked up along the way.
Somebody had said it to her.
Right.
Say what you mean and mean what you say, but don't say it in a mean way.
It was really a nice reminder about that alignment between what's happening inside of you and what you say out loud, but really trying to be mindful that compassion gets us so much further with the people in our lives than anything else does.
I mean, we can shame, we can invoke shame in other people and they will change their behavior.
Shame's a behavior changer, but it happens more beautifully and more gently and more gracefully when done with love.
So I really liked that.
But that oftentimes means I feel like I spend a lot of time with my couples in therapy, coaching them around, pausing conversations.
I think that, especially like in our Western US go go, go culture this idea that you just got to deal with stuff head on and talk it through and dig through it.
I think there are times when couples go on too long.
The conversation goes on too long.
It gets like cyclical and redundant and people end up being more polarized.
So I'm a big fan of dosing, micro dosing, conversation and pressing pause when we get activated and stepping away, coming back, especially big ones and tangly ones and ones that don't have easy, obvious answers.
I think that we do better to pause, reflect, come back, try again.
I think there's something really loving about that.
Yeah.
I mean, it also seems that in so much of this is depending on where one is, of what direction one needs to lean, right.
So I'm thinking about how, In one of our seasons of marriage therapy, we were working with the therapist on the fact that I came into our marriage highly conflict averse.
For me, love meant being nice, you know, always nice and not arguing.
And so I would laugh at them and say you know, I've never had a strong feeling about something that I haven't ruminated on for two weeks.
And then I might say something.
Whereas my wife on the other hand, never had a feeling that she didn't voice immediately.
And so, after doing a lot of therapy 15 years ago or so, I had to lean into speaking up, even when I might err on the side of being an ass.
And she had to err on the side of not speaking, even when that was so counterintuitive to her, because that allowed us to move a bit closer together.
But I don't know, commentary on that?
Oh, it's so good.
It's so good.
I think that's such.
I'm like thinking of so many different couples in my mind and friends of mine and my own relationship.
Yeah.
My husband says to me at times, he's more similar to you.
He'll say to me like there are things that you say to me that I would never in a million years say to you, you know, even though we also yeah.
Oh yeah.
Even though we've had seasons of couple therapy as well, and I think have made progress.
And I think there's a way in which the two of you are a power couple.
You hold the value of discernment for the marriage.
You know, you hold, you're carrying the torch for like less is more mindfulness, intentionality.
And your wife is carrying the torch, for you know, whatever realness, for emotionality, for like vibrance, you know, for fearlessness perhaps.
There's tremendous value in both of those you know, but it's like because you are different in that way, it's easy to feel confused.
It's easy to feel beleaguered.
It's easy to feel imbalanced, for sure.
But so many of those.
In my field they're called dialectics.
You know these kind of like both ands, where two things are true at once.
For you guys, that there's a value on temperance and there's a value on expression.
Those are both values.
There's so many of those in a marriage.
I think one that comes up a lot is there's a value on solitude and there's a value on togetherness.
Both of those are really essential to a flourishing life.
To use something that I know you are passionate about flourishing right.
We need solitude and we need connection.
But the chances that two people in a long-term marriage are going to want the same amount of connection and the same amount of solitude at the same time.
You know there's so many hurt feelings and dynamics that go along with that tension of when do we collaborate and when do we do things our own way.
So what I also know to be true is those differences can get scary.
We can start to feel like, are we just incompatible?
I know that that's where people are so at risk of going is differences can start to feel so scary and so threatening and so much like I must have chosen the wrong person.
So I think a lot of my work is helping people just create more capacity for tolerating these things that can feel tiring confusing, et cetera.
And for us it's often been as we learned more about boundaries.
You know we each could say I see where you're coming from.
But with that particular way of reacting or responding to this.
But I need to draw a boundary here and I just can't go there, there with you.
And, you know, I've done that with her.
She's done that with me.
Even last night, in a conversation with one of our sons, she said I need you to speak up more about this situation.
And I need some validation about my own experience in this.
So we've learned better about how to encourage one another, in our respective default modes, to lean into what's more constructive for the family system.
But again, it's been only through decades of work on this that we've been able to make progress on that.
Right.
And, by the way, the two of you have never been the parents of three children, relatively young adult sons.
So you're learning on the job also of how do you and that my gosh that we are also, we've got young adults a little bit younger than yours, but that's a kick in the booty, isn't it.
How do you go from coaching on the field to coaching from the sidelines, to when do you speak up?
When do you not speak up?
And the chances that both partners, both parents are going to have the exact same sense at the exact same time is like slim to none.
And then you know, the one who wants to speak up thinks the one who wants to be quiet as being neglectful.
And the one who wants to be quiet thinks the one who wants to speak up as being intrusive.
You know, it's just, it's just, it's just interesting.
And I was thinking also about with Laura being the one who's a little more whatever, shoot from the hip or speak up.
When I'm working, especially with a woman, I often say like a marriage is improved by the two to three things that you don't say every day.
For a woman at times, that can be a difficult skill to learn, because it feels like self-silencing, and it feels then like she is perhaps doing what the culture has done to her of asking her to quiet down, asking her to be a good girl, asking her to abandon herself to make somebody else comfortable.
So I think there can be like.
I find that there can be like a gendered piece there that can be troubling about how do I as a woman feel empowered, but also sometimes, you know, not say everything on my mind, not insist.
Let go a little bit.
Yeah.
It's bizarre that you point to that, because we've had that conversation just in the last month like twice.
Yeah, it's fascinating.
I'd love to talk a little bit about in your lesson 10 in Loving Bravely, Source Your Life.
And it's a little bit of background on why I'm so interested in this.
In moral philosophy and virtue theory there's this commonly discussed dynamic of in which growth in one virtue supports growth in another virtue.
I'll call this, for example, the overlapping nature of the virtues.
So, for example, if you work on being courageous, that can support your own personal growth, it can support contributions to your community, it can support contributions to your working at justice because you've worked on being courageous.
And it seemed to me that this chapter seems to point in a similar direction that as you grow as a human being, then you're growing in your capacity to be in a healthy love relationship.
It's a great number of things in your own life, in your personal growth, that if you really do work on yourself, that then allows you to have possibilities for love relationships that you wouldn't have otherwise.
But is that accurate depiction of what you're doing in that chapter?
Well, it makes so much sense.
What I immediately thought of, I just spent last weekend with my best friend.
I've had the same best friend for 41 years.
She just came to town for the weekend and I had her on my podcast a while ago and she talked about how she feels like our friendship strengthens her marriage.
It's just like there's flow between friendship and marriage.
And I often, when I'm getting to know a couple, I ask about their interests, their passions, their work obviously, their friendships.
Because, rather than those being threats to a marriage, I think in the best of worlds those amplify a marriage.
A success at work helps somebody feel proud of themselves and aligned and purposeful.
And then they feel a bit more, you know, invigorated within their relationship.
And that idea of, yeah, the flow between domains makes so much sense.
Yes, I do.
Anyways, long way of saying it is very hard to imagine a world where somebody is struggling with addiction that is untreated, struggling with mental health challenges that are untreated and expecting them somehow to create a thriving relationship.
Like how would that even work?
Or, By contrast, expecting the thriving relationship to be the medicine for the addiction.
Even though we know the research around specifically addiction, mental health stuff does show that both of those channels individual therapy and relationship therapy is the most effective route to healing addiction or healing.
But anyways, you can't substitute one for the other.
Going to take a short break, but coming right up, how to apologize?
Well, and the goods of self-compassion.
I just continue to be amazed at how so much work on human flourishing and the virtue traditions insist upon a holistic view of the human being that is not abstracted individualistically from their culture and their context.
It's like we have to have these holistic views of ourselves and our holistic view of the way in which our culture, our stories, our narratives, all of this stuff together is inseparable right.
And if we refuse to attend to any one segment, then we're kind of setting ourselves up for some sort of pain in some way, some sort of inhibition to our flourishing.
And the more we can kind of take that holistic account The better.
Which I had never heard of this healthy mind platter that you introduced there in that chapter where they point to their names.
What are Siegel and Rock?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Dan Siegel.
Yeah.
So they point to seven activities to kind of see these as activities that should kind of be in any sort of flourishing life.
Focus time, play time, connecting time, physical time, time in downtime and sleep.
Nourish then our mental well-being.
And I found that very helpful kind of to think of those as sort of the macronutrients of our lives.
And that again thinking about how all of that will contribute to flourishing in our love relationships, and the absence of that will contribute to some difficulties in that.
Right.
I think we need to be careful to not be perfectionistic like oh my gosh, I didn't have my connecting time today and therefore it's all ruined.
I think we can be.
Sometimes we can almost like overcorrect and then get really hard on ourselves if we aren't doing everything equally well at all times.
But just keeping that big picture idea that these are all to your point, that a good life or a thriving life is one that's got these different elements.
Yeah, we can't be giving everything to our careers and expecting there's a price to be paid when we get skewed too much in one direction.
For sure,
Part three of your book is on a self-expression mindset, helping us think through how personal emotional awareness and communication habits impact our relationships.
And one of those lessons there that you point to is learning to be present in our body as a key practice.
So tell us more about that.
That's actually my word for 2025 for myself is embodiment, being more in my body.
I think as somebody who's, I'm really comfortable in my head, really comfortable in my heart.
I feel like this is my year for being with my body and trusting my body.
And so yeah, that is and that ties to everything from our sexuality and knowing being needing to be in our bodies to be present to sexual experiences with a partner, but then also just noticing the shifts in our body when we're sharing space with our partner.
When do we feel ourselves opening up?
When do we feel ourselves shutting down?
Like just noticing those shifts and being responsible for them.
You know, I think so often we say, you made me mad.
You know, but did you make me mad or was there something that happened in my body in response to what you were saying?
And I'm also responsible for how I respond.
You know you made a comment and my body shifted, but that's not justification for responding any old kind of way.
There's still responsibility and accountability then for how I respond back to you.
Yeah, again, this is another one of those things that I've learned along the way.
And I think that two anecdotes from my own life experience in this regard.
One, I remember 20, 25 years ago, I was really worked up about something.
Don't have the foggiest idea what it was, but I called a mentor of mine and told him whatever it was.
And he could tell I was really upset.
And he said, well, the first thing I would suggest to you is to breathe.
And I thought, what?
That's what you've got for me?
But now I've remembered that for 20 plus years because I realized, oh, yeah, I'm not breathing.
Yeah.
And I have zero awareness of what's going on in my body, and breathing at that moment allowed me to pay attention to my body.
And by paying attention to my body, it allowed me to take a beat and to slow down.
Right.
And then another thing I learned somewhere along the way in therapy was that at one point one of the therapists we were in a very tense situation and the therapist pointed out how I kind of would I don't even know the word for it, but I kind of closed my body off in the face of conflict.
And she pointed that out to me.
And again, it was like, I've never realized that.
Right.
And so I think, learning to pay attention to my body, I've learned a lot of things about what's going on with me that otherwise I never would be aware of, unless I choose to start paying more attention to my body.
And then that helps me make.
It gives me more information and data about choices and responses that I can make, rather than simply reacting.
I was doing a an episode for my podcast is a blend of conversations with guests.
And then also these like solo episodes where I just talk through a topic.
And I did an episode on when shame blocks repair that.
When there's a rift between ourselves and our partner, there's a tension between guilt and shame.
You know guilt.
If I do something that hurts Todd's feelings and, it is adaptive for me to feel guilty, right?
Because guilt is an energizing emotion.
It will motivate me to apologize, to be curious, to make repair.
Shame is a hall of mirrors.
You know, shame is me just believing that I am bad.
You know, guilt is I did something bad.
Shame is I am bad.
And it's that collapsed posture, you know, like that's what my body does in shame.
And one of the things I was reading some research as part of this episode is And I was reading about this idea that when we're in shame, one thing we can do is adjust our bodies lift up our sternum, roll our shoulders back.
That actually helps us move from shame.
We think like, when I feel less shame, my body will shift.
But it's actually the shifting of the body that also moves us from shame into guilt, so that then we can make a step towards repair.
It's really interesting.
I was like, right, the arrow goes in both directions.
You know, the shame collapses us, but then the expansion can help us shift our emotions.
Yeah, that's super helpful.
On self-expansion, part four of your book.
A couple of things as we get closer to the end of our time together on apologizing key elements of an apology.
I think one place I want to start with the conversation about apologies is Why in the heck is it so hard to apologize?
Oh, my gosh.
I know.
I know.
I wrote I was like, do I have to write this chapter?
Because I it's taken me a lot of years to get better at my apologies.
I had to learn from my husband that you don't even get partial credit.
You know, if you roll your eyes and jut out your hip and say I'm sorry, like you don't even get partial credit for that stuff.
So, yeah, it's brutal.
It's brutal.
I mean, is there any kind of psychological theory behind why it's so hard to apologize?
I think it's different things for different people.
I know.
For me it's because it's taken me a long time to learn the difference between guilt and shame.
Ah, yes.
I would agree with that for myself as well.
We don't apologize because we're defending ourselves against the god-awful feeling of shame.
I think we don't apologize, because if we apologize, that means we acknowledge we did something wrong.
And if we acknowledge we did something wrong, then maybe the other person is going to really think less of us and leave us.
I think we're trying to scramble... to prevent all kinds of things we imagine are going to be awful.
But it turns out.
The awful thing is like leaving our partner feeling invalidated sometimes crazy, right.
Like crazy for like, but I know my feelings are hurt.
I know that's not how you want to be as a person.
So just freaking apologize already.
Give us a quick primer on key elements of making a good apology.
Yeah.
The key elements are avoiding passive voice.
I'm sorry that you were hurt.
It's I'm sorry. that I hurt you.
Avoiding a but.
I'm sorry I hurt your feelings, but you did that other thing.
I'm sorry I hurt your feelings, but you know I was really tired.
The but just negates everything that came before.
I think pairing it with a question.
I'm sorry.
And then do you want to tell me more about the hurt you're feeling?
Just making sure that you're really open to hearing about the hurt.
Sometimes there is no amends action, but I think sometimes there can be an amends.
Actually like making sure that the apology is also paired with a conversation about how might we prevent this going forward, or what am I going to take away from this and do differently?
You know, the idea of like the best apology is changed behavior.
Sometimes that's not necessary, but sometimes that is kind of connecting this incident to other incidents and talking about what's a shift that might be necessary here.
On presence.
Yeah.
Importance of being fully present.
This is obviously so increasingly difficult in the distracted world in which we live.
But what's some tips in that regard?
Don't fub.
Yeah, fubbing is P-H-U-B, like a fub.
Fubbing is phone snubbing.
I've never heard that.
Of course, I don't use a cell phone, so I'm not into all the cell phone stuff.
Yeah, you wouldn't fub.
I love that.
Now I can tell people, stop fubbing me.
The tricky thing is that when I have my phone in my hand, I'm really sure that I can listen as well.
I can scroll and listen to my husband, but I can't.
The research shows I can't.
But inside of me, phenomenologically, I feel like I can't.
But by contrast, when he's looking at his phone, I feel disconnected.
I feel offended.
I feel devalued.
I'm really sure he can't listen to me as well as if he had his phone down.
So I think that couples, and actually families as well, need to decide is it phone time or is it conversation time?
Because we really truly can't do both at once, and we now have plenty of science that backs that up.
So to your point, presence is harder than ever, likely more important than ever, and totally doable.
We are humans.
We are wired for presence, but we have to get the phones even just out of our hands.
Even a phone... flipped over on a table compromises the quality of conversation that has been found.
Yeah, I know.
I feel like even the phone turned upside down, as you said, at a table, it's still a third presence, right?
Totally.
Because it could go off any moment.
And we're all waiting to see if it's going to go off or not.
And then to see what the other person is going to do if it does go off, you know.
Right, right.
Or I'm just aware of it.
I'm aware that there's something I could be doing.
There's a whole bunch of things happening inside that tiny rectangle that I could be Yeah.
So self-compassion.
We've had Kristen Neff as well on our show and I saw that you engage her work and you connect self-advocacy and self-compassion, which I find interesting.
So talk to us about that just a little bit.
Yeah.
Well, you've worked with Kristen, you know how vital self-compassion is.
And I think that is, it's not about letting ourselves off the hook.
It's not about making excuses.
It is treating ourselves lovingly, so that we can ask for what we need, so that we can be agents of our relationships.
And boy, it's really hard.
I know the days when I struggle with my own self-compassion.
I am much more likely to interpret my husband's neutral comments as criticisms.
You know, something that is truly neutral will land to me as critical, because it feels like he's doing to me what I've been doing to me.
So my own self-compassion practices are really helpful to our relationship.
Yeah.
And again, I think that that relates to the way a lot of times theologically, in the Christian tradition you know, the strong emphasis upon service to another person and that love is service to another person.
But overlooking.
You know that Jesus talks about the two great commandments love of God and love your neighbor as you love yourself.
And it's that learning to love ourselves well, I think we can overlook, right?
If I don't know how to love myself well, I'm not very good at loving other people.
And I think that's one of the things you're pointing us to here.
Yep.
Yep.
That's great.
That's great.
Last question that you kind of close us out with, maybe some encouragement with regard to perseverance and resilience.
If somebody's listening and they're thinking, you know, that's just too much stuff to do.
I can't even begin to make my way into these practices.
What kind of closing encouragement would you give us to lean in and keep working at it?
Well, first, self-compassion.
I would imagine if somebody has had some light bulb moments, even listening to this conversation, can you hold those as insights and invitations, rather than taking them and beating yourself up for all the times you didn't know what you're starting to know now.
So that would be.
One thing is to really like eyes on the horizon rather than looking in the anew again and again, and that we have to right.
I think you and I have been really open in this conversation about our years of self-work and relationship work and still our screw-ups and our foot in our mouth.
And so that's why the pieces about apology and forgiveness are really essential.
I think also to hold on to how much courage there is in looking at the impact of the past, your own past, your own pain, the things that you didn't get when you were little, that you really needed.
It doesn't matter if you're 30 or 50 or 70 and reflecting on that stuff.
It does.
It matters.
And it's incredibly liberating to look at your story and what you've lived through and figure out what you want and need now, in this moment.
I've been talking to Dr Alexandra Solomon, host of the podcast Reimagining Love and today discussing her book Loving Bravely.
Alexandra, thanks so much.
This has been a great conversation and I've thoroughly enjoyed it.
I have as well, Lee.
Thank you so much.
You're a wonderful conversation partner.
Thank you.
You've been listening to No Small Endeavor and our interview with Dr Alexandra Solomon psychologist, author and host of the podcast Reimagining Love, in which we've been discussing her book Loving Bravely.
We gratefully acknowledge the support of Lilly Endowment Incorporated and private philanthropic foundation supporting the causes of community development, education and religion.
Our thanks to all the stellar team that makes this show possible.
Christy Bragg, Jacob Lewis, Sophie Byard, Tom Anderson, Kate Hayes, Mary Evelyn Brown, Carrie Harmon, Jason Cheesley, Audrey Griffith and Tim Lauer.
Thanks for listening and and let's keep exploring what it means to live a good life together.
No Small Endeavor is a production of PRX, Tokens Media LLC, and Great Feeling Studios.
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