Help! I’m only attracted to the “wrong type” & what to do when I’m no longer “in love”

January 5, 2023

Help! I’m only attracted to the “wrong type” & what to do when I’m no longer “in love”

Why am I only attracted to “toxic” partners?
How can I heal & move on from old wounds?
What do I do when I love my partner, but I’m no longer “in love”?
How do you define love?
How do I deal with a partner who blames everyone else for their problems?

Psychologist Dr. Alexandra Solomon joins Jess & Brandon to answer your relationship questions. She explains why we sometimes avoid healthy relationships and; why we might; be drawn to harmful ones. And she also provides a nuanced look at how learning and healing from old wounds can help us to change the future — without dwelling on the past. Finally, they discuss how couples can deal with the challenge of loving one another while no longer being “in love”.

Follow Dr. Alexandra Solomon’s work:

Thank you to Lovehoney for their support of this podcast! Save on toys, lingerie, and much more at Lovehoney.com with code DRJESS15

And if you have podcast questions, please submit them here. You can find the podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Podbean, Google Podcasts, Amazon Music & Stitcher!

Rough Transcript:

This is a computer-generated rough transcript, so please excuse any typos. This podcast is an informational conversation and is not a substitute for medical, health, or other professional advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the services of an appropriate professional should you have individual questions or concerns.

Help! I’m only attracted to the “wrong type” & what to do when I’m no longer “in love”

Participant #1:
You’re listening to the Sex with Dr. Jess podcast, sex and relationship advice you can use tonight. Welcome to the sex with Dr. Jess Podcast. I’m your co host Brandon Ware, here with my lovely other half, Dr. Jess. Happy New Year. Happy New Year 2023. This is going to be a good one. And I’m excited for our conversation today because we’re going to talk about being in love versus loving someone. We’re going to talk about the paradox of healing. I’m hoping to talk about attraction to people that you don’t want to be attracted to and lack of attraction to the people you do want to attracted to, be attracted to. With Dr. Alexandra Solomon, who is a psychologist, she’s got a huge following on Instagram. She got her own podcast. I’m super excited for that. Before she joins us, big shout out to our sponsor launching us into 2023. My friends at Love Honey and I have been working with Love Honey for a long, long, long time. Long, long, long, long time. And you can check out all of their goodies. They have a whole bunch of New Year’s sales. And I’ve got an extra discount code. Dr. Jess Ten for Lovehoney.com. Lovehoney CA all the different Love Honey sites. So if you’re looking for lingerie, if you’re looking for latexware, if you’re looking for all the good vibes to start the year with good vibes, love Honey.com code Dr. Jess Ten to say. All right, without further ado, we are going to get into this. Joining us now is Dr. Alexandra H. Solomon, a psychologist and author, the host of her own podcast, Reimagining Love, that covers everything relationship related, from your background in therapy to academic approaches to pop culture, representations of relationships and how that affects how we relate in real life, basically all the practical aspects of relating. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you so much for having me. This is such a treat to get to spend some time with you. Yes. And a great way to start 2023, because you’re brilliant. You have you have a couple of books. You have not only the podcast Reimagining Love You Have Taking Sexy Back How to Own Your Sexuality and Create the Relationships You Want. Best Selling Award winning book. And you have another book. Loving bravely 20 Lessons of Self Discovery to help you get the love you want. And you have a big following on Instagram and everyone needs to go check out Dr. Alexandra Solomon on IG. There’s a dot between each of those words, so we’ll just put it in the show notes for you, and I’ll post it on my IG. But you have so much to share. And I’ve been going through some of your podcasts, some of your blog posts, and some of your IG posts, which is, I think, a great place to get started. And so we’re going to go through some of these different concepts from emotional differentiation to the value of brutal honesty. We’re going to talk about the paradox of healing, learning from your past, but being in the present. And then what I really want to get to is what to do when you feel you’re not in love but you still love your partner. This is a big one. But before we get to that, I have a question, a nice short and sweet question from a listener who is confused about attraction and why they’re attracted to a certain type of person that they don’t want to be attracted to and why they’re not attracted to the person they want to be attracted to. So this is what she’s written in why am I attracted to guys who are toxic to me? And whenever I meet someone who is good on paper, whom I really like, there is no attraction. Okay, well, I want to hear your take on this as well. I think this is such a well, first of all, thank you for the really sweet introduction. It’s wonderful to just get to be with you and I’m really eager to hear your take on this also. But I think this happens quite a bit, doesn’t it? Where it’s like my brain wants one thing, but my heart and my body seem to want something else. And this is where all of the work that I do comes back to this idea I call relational self awareness, which is understanding what we bring to the table, how our past, how our experiences, especially in our family of origin, shape everything about what we want, need and expect from intimate partnership. And so if I was sitting with fiscal in therapy, the first thing I would do, which is what I do with all of my clients, is I would take a piece of paper and I would draw her family tree. I would want her genogram, I would want to understand her siblings, her parents, her grandparents even. And I’d be talking about the kinds of relationships that she saw growing up. And so it’s about observation. What did she see and then relation, how did the people in her family, how did the big people in her family relate to her when she was small? Because all of that factors into the equation of the people she feels drawn to for intimate partnership and the people she feels pushed away from for intimate partnership. So I would guess that there’s some gold in those hills around looking at perhaps there’s something about unavailability or insensitivity that just feels familiar to her. And sometimes we are drawn to the very thing that was so painful to us when we were little because A, it feels familiar and B because it’s sort of like I couldn’t get what I needed back then, but maybe I can get what I need now. So we’re almost like drawn to the challenge or the lack of availability. So that would be some of the hypotheses that I’d be wanting to disentangle with her. That makes so much sense. So do we tend to confuse or conflate familiarity with safety? Yes, I think because when we think about our nervous systems, there’s a way in which AHA, like I know that pattern. That pattern is familiar of you’re here and you’re not here, or your words and your actions don’t match. Even though I don’t like it. Like liking something is different from being familiar with it. So when somebody shows up, we don’t know what she means when she says toxic. But when somebody shows up and they are available and their words match their actions and their heart feels open, that feels unfamiliar and then unfamiliar equals unsafe. And so there really is a process of her just having to go step by step, bit by bit with somebody who’s available and just like take her time and let her nervous system adjust and adapt to this different way of being. And how do you even begin that process? I understand if you have a therapist who can support you through it and provide you with strategies and kind of do a check in every week, that’s really helpful. But if somebody’s on their own, maybe they don’t have access to therapy, maybe their current therapist doesn’t have the same background, I think another approach could be really helpful. How do we start to chip away at that conflation of familiarity and safety? How do we reconcile the conflict between what makes us feel or we think makes us feel safe versus what we seem to actually want? Because when she says good on paper, that could mean that this person lives up to socio cultural norms of what I should want. But I’m reading that as somebody I actually do want. I just can’t seem to feel excitement with that person. That’s right. Well, yeah, that’s the other thing we’d have to really unpack with her, isn’t it, is when she says good on paper, what does that mean? One of my trigger phrases is like checks all the boxes. Like this person checks all the boxes. I’m like, okay, what are the boxes? What are the things that you are saying? Because if it’s that they have they meet this income threshold or this height threshold or they have come from this kind of a family, those kinds of things are not of course that’s not going to necessarily excite her heart or her soul. Right. Because then it’s sort of like, okay, all I’ve done is cross the threshold of somebody else’s standards. What we want is for her to be drawn to somebody where she feels like she can be seen. So I think what’s helpful is rather than getting hyper focused on sizing the other person up, I think what’s really helpful is for her to start to practice how do I feel when I’m sharing space and time with this person? What part of me is coming forward do I like the me that I am in this dynamic with this person? It’s very, very the different way of feeling into a new relationship, that approach. I talk about that so often in dating where people are focused on what do they think of me or how do they size up or do they check the boxes? And I’m always asking them, can you check into not only how you feel, but exactly what you said? How do you feel about yourself in the presence of this person? Because anyone can make you feel good in the moment, anyone can make you feel excited, anyone can make you feel happy or joyful, but how do you feel about yourself? And I think that’s an important measure of all types of relationships, right? When we think about friends that maybe we’ve been friends with for 510, 20 plus years or longer, and sometimes we walk away from meeting with those people and we kind of don’t like ourselves that much. And I always like people to kind of check in with, okay, what are they bringing out in you and what role are you playing? But when we look at how we feel about ourselves in the presence of others, I think it’s an indication of the type type of relationship and can help us to assess whether or not that relationship is really valuable and meaningful and fulfilling to us. Yes. And if how she feels about herself is that she feels really like whole and worthy and valued and valuable, that right there might feel really confronting, right? Because that might feel like the little girl who didn’t who felt like she had to kind of hustle for her sense of worthiness, who had to perform in order to be seen. If in this new relationship, what the person she’s partnering with is just like, I see you, I like you, I want time with you. Nothing that you’ve done or not done made it so I just like you as a person that might feel really, really new, where she’s like she gets to be a human being rather than a human being. She’s not trying to figure out the next strategy. That might be a really different way of relating and that might take her some time to feel like she deserves that. I think we don’t spend nearly enough time focused on just how freaking difficult it is to receive and to allow, especially when we spent so much of our lives just trying to kind of earn and enforce just as looking at me, this is me too, at T, right? Not necessarily thinking about how I’m feeling about myself in the presence of others. It’s more just about doing. And I’m constantly in the midst of doing things for others and not actually reflecting. So I’m just sitting here nodding the whole time using this as my own personal therapy session here. So I apologize. I’m making notes because that’s what little brandon knew. Right. That’s what you used to do when you were little. Yeah. It’s like putting your hand like I have my hand on my heart right now. It’s like telling that young guy, like that little guy, like, it’s okay. That was then, this is now. We don’t have to do today what we used to have to do back then. Whenever we bump into one of those four wounds or old tender spots, it’s like that part of us deserves infinite amounts of compassion, because that’s the part of you that learned, that figured out what had to be done in that context. That behavior made sense in that context. And so, yes, now now we’re talking about unlearning and shifting, but we have to honor whatever patterns we develop. We develop those for some really, really darn good reason. Right. And that’s not an easy thing. Like, you’re talking to two people, pleasers, here, who are really working to be less focused on pleasing and less focused on in my case, I don’t know about yours, Brendan, but on controlling other people’s reactions and trying to kind of pad everybody else’s feelings. I know that I’ve said this before. Sometimes I feel like I’m those bumpers in the bowling alley stopping the ball from going off the rails in so many different types of relationships. Not with Brandon, but in other relationships in my life and letting go and knowing that sometimes they’re going to fall in the gutter, and sometimes it’s going to be what do you call it when you don’t get any bowling pins down? I don’t know. Let’s just call it a giant miss. Okay. Sometimes it’s going to be a gutter ball for other people is a hard thing to let go of. So you bring up a really important point there that if we’re not comfortable feeling whole and feeling valued and feeling worthy, you said it could be new, and new can be exciting, but new can also be scary, and then we can resist that attraction. So we could in fact, be washing the attraction because there’s a fear. Right. It’s another way to protect ourselves. And you’ve been talking about wounds and going back to the past, but being in the presents. And you’ve written about the paradox of healing. So on your instagram, I was reading the other day, what you wrote was, this paradox exists when you think, when I was young, I experienced wounding in my family of origin that affects my life today, and that can be true. And at the same time, again, these are your words. This is what you wrote. You may not remember too, a t, but at the same time, when I blame my family of origin for the problems in my life today, I remain stuck, and both of those things can be true. So how do we begin to like the nuance of this, the paradox of it? How do we look to the past for understanding, to inform, to basically move forward without being stuck in that place where we say, well, I am this way because this happened when I was younger. How do we not make it both a self fulfilling prophecy, but also, how do we not typecast ourselves when in fact behavior, feelings, responses are fluid and not fixed? Yeah. Yeah. It’s such a rich question. The way you set it up is a really rich framework for it. And I think it highlights that healing is dynamic and it’s never done. I’ve been a therapist for decades. I have been in therapy for decades, and I’m not ever going to be done because my context keeps changing, right? So the way that my path shaped me when I was 30 and a young parent, I had to figure that out, right? I had to figure out how becoming a parent triggered feelings I had about dependence and responsibility and intimacy and affection that were shaped by my early experiences. But now here I am, I’m launching my nest, right, like I’m launching these little babies out into the world. And that brings up another entire set of feelings that again tied to my past. So I think what healing becomes then is a process of when we feel something in this moment, we look towards the past to understand why we’re feeling it in this moment. And then we come back to this moment and we invite a different kind of response. We say, okay, so I feel triggered by what my teenage daughter said because of this wound, the sensitivity that I’m perhaps forever going to have. But what’s different today is I can notice the trigger, understand its root, come back to the moment today and then choose a different kind of a response. So it’s like the past forever. We don’t stay stuck in the past, but we forever, I think, use the past to understand. Why is this moment troubling me? Because the moment is when I go from calm, open minded, seeing lots of perspectives, to feeling fixed, either ashamed of myself or blaming of somebody else. It’s in the moment of constriction and activation that we pause. And we pause so that we can sort of find our bearings. And our bearings, ten times out of ten, have to do with something from the past. So the past remains there as the backdrop, and it provides us with information. But you’re right, it’s not ever about blaming the people who raised us, because the vast majority of us were raised by people who tried to do the best they could at the time they were doing it. They were raising us to the degree of their awareness, to the extent of their healing. And they also are dynamic. And that’s the most I love when I get a chance to do that work with families, of having families get to know each other again on new terms. And so for those of us who have siblings who are alive, parents or attachment figures who are alive. Part of how we heal is also kind of getting to renew those connections. And we can have different relationships today than we could have had back then. And that sometimes is a part of our healing as well. Not for all of us. For some of us we have to keep space, or for some of us, we don’t have those people in our lives anymore. But for those of us who do, that kind of rediscovery work can also be healing. And that healing work, especially if you’re going to past relationships where harm was caused, where you are dealing with wounds, how often are you finding that clients are going back and talking to, let’s say, for example, parents about how they’re responding today based on experiences from their past? So obviously you’re not supporting people to go and say, mom, it’s your fault that I can’t finish project. But are you seeing people facilitate conversations with parents that open the eyes of both parties and that allow them to renew those relationships? Yes. So I write about this loving bravely. My first book has 20 lessons, and one of the lessons is about kind of going back to the people who raised you and having I call it in the book, a loving, update conversation where you go in and you say, can I spend some time asking you some questions? And the questions are broad and they’re gentle and they’re curious. And this kind of project of talking to your parents or your attachment figures today about the past, about the present, it’s something I have guided thousands and thousands of my students I’ve been teaching at Northwestern for years and so I’ve guided thousands of students through that. And it’s like, it’s amazing the kinds of stuff that happens between parents and adult kids when the conversation isn’t. So often we have these conversations that are triggered by something that happened. There was a fight or a conflict. But I love the idea of just the adult child coming in curiously with some questions and just asking for dialogue. And what so often happens is it gives us a chance to see our mother as a woman, our father as a man, like to see our parent as a three dimensional creature beyond just how we’ve experienced them our whole lives, which is as our parent, we can see them in more of their human complexity. And I think it can be a compassion opener, I’m sure. And I’m going to think about this from my own perspective and many of my friends, many of us are first generation Canadians, and so we came from not only cultures but experiences with our parents where they didn’t have the space to open up, about their background, about the hardships they faced, about the challenges. I don’t want to share too much about other people in my family, obviously, but I think about people who, for example, came to Canada or came to the States and faced ongoing discrimination and did not have the space to talk about it the way we do. So we have this opportunity to name it to some degree, we have an opportunity to call it out. Of course, we can’t always call it out. We suffer through it as well. But they were tight lipped about it, and they did so much just to, I think, make everything easier for us, and they’re just trying to get by. Like, they received messages that you were lucky to have a job, that you were lucky to be here, as opposed to this country is lucky to have them. And I think about how so many of us I talk about this with a couple of my very close friends who are also Chinese, how so many of our parents didn’t tell us anything about themselves, and now we’re learning things. Like, I have a friend who found the Chinese head tax kind of immigration certificate. That one of her. I can’t remember if it was a grandparent. A grandparent. And the history of that and the, oh, my gosh, like, I get goosebumps talking about the trauma of that. And our parents never told us a thing, and I don’t think we were ever curious, because when you’re young, you’re just trying to stay out of trouble, trying to get the grades, trying to do whatever it is you have to do. And then when you’re older, sometimes there are wounds or there are histories or just time gets in the way way. And these impediments stop us from learning about our parents as these complete human beings. And, yeah, it really makes me think about what questions some of us might want to ask and what we could learn. Not to excuse behavior, not to say, Well, I did this because but as you said, our past always plays a role in our current behavior. When I guide my students of mine who are immigrants or first generation through this experience, it really is. It’s a way of holding on to, like, my parents didn’t have the kind of time and space to do the introspective work that I have now. So it’s holding on to that duality of I didn’t get what I needed, and I’m so deeply grateful for what my parents did to make my life possible. Both those things can coexist. One doesn’t negate the other, and that’s what you’re speaking to. It’s like honoring the trauma and the lineage and all the effort that parents and grandparents went through to get us to this moment while also holding on to the consequence of that. Right. Both those things can be true. Our parents tried so hard in really difficult contexts, and we could have not gotten what we needed, and that needs to also be named. In your book, Levi Bradley, do you talk do you give examples of how to how to navigate that because I’ve got to tell you, I don’t have a deep relationship with my parents. And I feel like if I were to go and start those conversations with my parents about the past, I feel like it could depending on the questions, it could really not end well. I feel like there has to be a willingness from the person on the other end to be interested in doing that. Otherwise it might be perceived as being confrontational or aggressive or something like that. Self righteous. Yeah, I am. Well, you’ll have to take a look and see the list of questions inside the Loving Bravely book, and you see do they seem like they’re ones that would be inviting to your parents, or would they be confrontational? But I think the framing I think the framing matters. What I really want is the image I have is, like, you and your parents kind of sitting energetically, sitting side by side, looking together at the family’s story. So it’s not you versus your parents. I spent a lot of time in the book talking about really being thoughtful, about not coming in with an axe to grind so that you really are coming in almost like an ethnographer or an anthropologist, and you’re just trying to understand. I recently had a conversation with my mom. We were in a long car drive, and I started asking her about her divorce from my dad. And I was deeply curious about, like, wanting to understand. You know, we were almost like, well, we were literally shoulder to shoulder because we were in the car. But it was like, let’s just look together at the woman that you were and looking at the timeline and what she experienced along the way and what that must have been like for her. So that was I really led with curiosity, and it opened up new deep wells of compassion for my mom that I don’t think I ever had experienced because I had never asked the questions in that way. And I think my own I was able to put my own tender spots kind of off to the side so that I could really be curious about her. Yeah. I assume that the way you approach a parent or anyone that you want to have this conversation with really is important because I think about sometimes again with first generation, but just any younger generation will sometimes go to parents and kind of suggest, like, well, I’m more evolved because I’m in therapy and my generation is more emotionally literate. And I’ve even heard people close to me and my family talk about how their parents are emotionally stunted, as though we have it all figured out. We will be there one day. We’ll be those people. Exactly. So I think we just have to approach all of these conversations with compassion and do encourage people to go check out Love Bravely 20 Lessons of Self Discovery to help you get the love you want. And your website, of course, if people want to find any of these links, is Dr. Alexandra Solomon.com, and we’ll stick those in the show notes. Now, there is this bigger topic I want to address about love. And love is such a complex concept. Anytime you read any treaties or any philosophy or any literature on what love is, no one can seem to pin it down and come up with a succinct definition with which they’re completely satisfied. And I’m curious about the concept of being in love versus loving a partner, because you recently did I think you did a several part podcast on this, on reimagining love. And so what do we do when somebody says, I really love my partner, but I’m just not in love with them? What the heck does that mean? I want to start because you were talking about the definition of love. And so the way I have resolved that definition of love is that bell hooks in, I think, 2002, she wrote all about love, and her definition is from one of the original self help gurus, M. Scott Peck, and he defined love way back in the 70s as an ongoing commitment to somebody else’s spiritual evolution. Right? And I just see you guys, Jess and Brandon are like, yeah, that’s the definition that really does work, because it captures what I love about the definition is it captures, like, growth and evolution. It’s a dynamic, right? It’s about, I’m going to keep showing up and watching you evolve. I have a front row seat to your evolution and you have a front row seat to my evolution. I think it builds in that idea of this is alive. So I think that’s where I go with that working. And it’s so beautiful. It applies across all types of relationships, from romantic love to parent child love to friendships to even if we look at romantic love, whether it be monogamous, whether it be consensually, non monogamous, it is this beautiful commitment to growth. So what does it mean, though, when you somebody says, I love my partner, we love each other so much, but we’re not in love. So I think the reason that I spent an entire podcast episode teasing this apart is that so often it ends up getting said, it ends up getting being words that we plop at our partners, like, I love you, but I don’t know if I’m in love with you. And we sort of make it our partner’s problem. It’s just sort of like, this is what it is. And I think part of what happens is that falling in love and being in love are two really different things. And falling in love for lots of people, it has an energy of its own. It’s almost like you’re trying to keep up with it. Right? There’s lots of spontaneous sexual desire very often early in a relationship, as you well know. And so it. Feels like you just are kind of going with a flow. You’re just in this flow of something that has movement to it. And then what happens as we make commitments and as we develop familiarity and as we deepen into attachment is the energy shifts and there’s more responsibility on both partners to be putting energy in, to be like investing. And desire sometimes shifts from that spontaneous, like, I want to jump your bones to more responsive, which is I need some context clues to cue my body, to cue my desire. I need to have it scheduled so that I prioritize my energy for the day it shifts. And that shifts can feel very, very confusing for people. And what happens is if we don’t understand that those shifts are normative, we start to pathologize it and we say, something’s wrong with me, something’s wrong with you, or something’s wrong with us. And so then what we end up saying is, I love you. Meaning, I’m attached to you, but I’m not in love with you because how could I be in love with you? Because I don’t feel the same kind of energy I felt in the beginning. So I think what often is happening is that people are just misunderstanding because where the heck are we supposed to learn this kind of relation? We don’t have robust relational or sexual education, so we are never taught that this is normative for sexual desire to shift or the need to kind of be investing in erotic connection over time. So those are some of the initial thoughts that I have about that I love you, but I’m not in love with you very often. It’s a misunderstanding of how love evolves. Yeah. And it sounds like you’re tying it to this sense of spontaneous attraction and spontaneous desire. I think when people say this too, and I don’t think it’s purposeful and this is without judgment, I say this. I think there’s an avoidance of accountability because we’re talking about something so abstract. How do we even talk about not being in love? Do you mean you don’t feel butterflies in your tummy? And I always talk about what butterflies really are. It’s a stress response, right? It’s your digestive tract and your anal sphincter responding to the stress of not knowing if somebody is into you. And stress is exciting, right? The excitement of not knowing how they’re going to respond, of not knowing what they look like, of not knowing whether or not it’s going to work between the two of you. That stress is actually exciting and creates butterflies. It’s not true love. It’s anal sphincter and digestive tract contractions, as we know, and I think most people probably here know, that you can create that passion, you can create that excitement. Is it going to feel exactly like it did when you first met? Of course not. But you can have glimpses of that. You can have moments of that, you can have something totally different that’s all the more intense and all the more meaningful and perhaps feels like falling in love again for not prolonged periods of time. But it can shift over time. And that’s why I actually like how you began with the definition of love being ever evolving. And so I think you’ve sort of answered this, but what do you do if you feel like we really love each other but we’re not in love? I’m sure it’s about investing in the relationship, but where do you suggest people begin? I think the moment, whatever chapter of a couple’s love story where that feels like it’s the narrative I love you, but I’m not in love with you. The couple really does need to do some investigating, some looking, because I could imagine if we had five different couples who had that feeling, there would be five different kinds of hearts of the matter that we would have to be using apart. And even just that shift. That’s a shift. Right? Rather than me putting this problem at my partner’s feet, it’s me saying, My dear, I don’t feel as drawn to our connection as I have at other times. I’m troubled. Like, will you be with me and figure this out together? That’s a radically that framing of like, can we work together? Because I feel shut down. I feel distant from you. I don’t feel connected to you. Can we look at it together? It’s a radically different set up than, I don’t know. I love you, but I’m not in love with you. There’s really no opening there, right? So I think I can take the risk of naming something’s going on with me. I don’t feel connected or drawn in the ways that I want to. And saying, can we work together? On it just opens up new pathways. And for one couple, you’re right. It might be that they sign up for salsa dance classes. For another couple, it means that they make some tweaks to how they spend time. They start doing dates in the morning because nobody’s got energy in the evening. Or it means that they work with grandparents and have a bit more childcare and respite. It means that they study a bit more about sexuality. They decide to kind of retool themselves around sex. But it opens new possibilities when it becomes our problem. I know that you say this all the time too. Every sexual problem is a couple problem. It’s never about, is it my fault or your fault? It’s about how do we approach this as a team? The symptom may live inside of me, but it’s got data for the two of us. This issue of blame has kind of come up throughout this conversation. When we look at old wounds, when we look at, you know, telling our partners that we’re not feeling what we want to be feeling. If you have a partner who has a tendency to blame, how can you help to disrupt that pattern? How can you let them know? Okay, it would be easier for me to approach this. It would be easier for us to be collaborators on this if I didn’t feel like it was all my fault or if I didn’t feel as though it all falls on me. How do you kind of call somebody out if they have a tendency to blame? Because there’s many reasons people blame, which is a whole other conversation around safety. But how do we kind of get them to hear us without making it sound like we’re blaming them? Because if they’re blaming us all the time, it’s because they have a big fear of being held responsible. That’s right. Well, yeah, that’s what I was thinking about, is that somebody who’s invested if somebody’s invested in blaming me, what they’re telling me is that they are terrified of it being their fault and that they don’t trust me to hold them in warm regard. Right. So what I might want to lead with is saying, I know that you are trying so hard right now. I may meet that person’s blame if I can, and this takes a ton of self compassion and patience if I can meet my partner’s blame by saying what I know for sure is that you are trying really hard. And I also know that I’m trying really hard. And I know that we are having a hard time. So in responding in that way, I’m offering compassion to the two of us. And I’m speaking a bit indirectly to the fact that, listen, if you’re blaming me, it must be because you’re afraid of this being on you. And so let me remind you that I know that you are a deeply good person, that you value our relationship, that you treasure this connection and that you’re having a very hard time. So if I can sort of meet it and soften it, it might then invite the other person to put their guard down a little bit. But it’s hard. That’s hard. Our natural response to being blamed is to kind of put our dukes up a little bit emotionally because it’s survival. It’s survival. No one wants to be wrong. No one wants to be kicked out of the pack. You’re very good at this, at taking responsibility. And I find that the moment someone says Maya Culpa, everybody kind of calms down, the tension is broken. And you’re like, oh, they’re taking responsibility. Maybe I could take some responsibility too. And this applies in the workplace. We see this all the time. Well, you give me that credit. But it came after years of like Dr. Solomon was saying, putting my dukes up because that was my default tendency. And then I realized that once I said, okay, just take a beat. You know what? I see my responsibility in this. I just take a beat. Then I’m able to kind of approach with a different mindset. And it has been a much more effective way for us to resolve whatever issue it is. And I’m sitting here listening and nodding and taking notes because I’m like, so much of this is applicable to so many different relationships that I have. It’s not just with your partner. It can be with friends, it can be with family, it can be with everyone. So I feel like there’s so much great. I’m just making so many notes here. I love it. Yeah. When we can do it. The best response to blame is empathy in that blaming comment. Whatever. It sounds like you’re really disappointed that we didn’t go out last Friday. It sounds like your feelings are really hurt that I didn’t Max Y and Z. And that doesn’t mean that having empathy with what you’re saying doesn’t mean I agree with it, doesn’t mean that it’s capital T, truth. But I am just responding to the emotion that I imagine you’re having as you blame. Right? There’s so much of, like, the human and me sees the human and you, and we’re all imperfect and we all struggle at times, and it is leading with love. And when we go back to this original question of when I love my partner but I’m not in love with them, there has to be some reframing of what we expect love to be, right? Love is not sparks flying. Love is not chasing someone down in an airport. Love is not all of these tropes that we see. And as you said, in the absence of comprehensive education that focuses on what meaningful, fulfilling relationships ought to look like, we have almost no representations from which to learn, with the exception of our parents. And we were observing from a different perspective. We weren’t sitting there, as you said, ethnographers or anthropologists trying to learn. We were just either trying to please our parents or working around our parents or doing what our parents said or trying to rebel against our parents. So we weren’t there as observers in the relationship. So we turned to pop culture. And that’s why I’m glad you do talk about pop culture on your podcast. Next up, I know I’m going to be a little bit late, but I would love to do an analysis of those relationships on White Lotus. Did you watch White Lotus? Oh, my gosh. That’s all we’ve been talking about. I only watched one episode and I can’t stop hearing about White. This is my first time in my life I’ve been able to contribute to pop culture conversations. So I’m like, we’re at holiday parties in the last little while, and I’m like, who watch White Lotus? Let’s talk about it. But a whole other can of worms. And I feel like you’ve given us not only so much to think about, but so many actions that we can take to start more meaningful conversations. To reimagine love, to keep learning along the way and I highly encourage people to check out your podcast, reimagining love. Check out your website, Dralexandra. Solomon.com, for all of your books, all of your links, all of your courses and all that jazz. Doctor, thank you so much for being here. I know I’ve learned so much. And I can see from Brandon’s page of notes next to me, he’s doing a bunch of learning. And I will be probably one of the many benefactors from the lessons he’s taken out of this conversation. Thank you so much. It was great to be with both of you. Wonderful questions, and it was just a great back and forth. I feel like we covered a lot of good ground. Important ground. Agreed. Thank you so much again, and thank you for listening. Thank you to our sponsors. Love, honey. Don’t forget you can save@lovehune.com with code. Dr. Jess Ten Hope 2023 is off to a great start for you, sending you all the good vibes. We’ll be back next week with a brand new episode. You’re listening to the sex with Dr. Jess podcast. Improve your sex life. Improve your life.

Blog

January 5, 2023

Help! I’m only attracted to the “wrong type” & what to do when I’m no longer “in love”

Featured by