00:00

Hi there, welcome to Intentional Living with Tanya Hale. This is episode number 273, "The Love Language Problem." Welcome to your place for finding greater happiness through intentional growth, because we don't just fall into the life of our dreams...we choose to create it. This is Tanya Hale and I'm your host for Intentional Living.

00:20

All right. Hello there, my friends. Welcome to the podcast today. Thanks for being here. Hey, a couple of things I want to touch base on before we get moving. I am getting ready to put some new group coaching classes out there. I do not have the topics yet, but I am working on getting that taken care of right now. So if you want to make sure that you're one of the first ones to find out about those, if you're interested in that, make sure that you go to tanyahale.com. You can go over to the tab that says "contact me." You need to scroll down just a little bit and it will say sign up for the "weekend win." If you sign up for that, if you're not already, you will get an email that lets you know when those classes are coming out and give you all the details about that so that you don't miss it. They're great. They're so fun. I enjoy these classes so much. I usually cap them at about eight people so that it's not so big that everybody doesn't really like them. I enjoy them a lot. So if you would like to join me for those, make sure that you get signed up. 01:30 And also thank you to those who have gone on either Apple or Spotify and put in a review for me. I appreciate that. The more reviews I get, the higher that it shows up on people's "you might be interested in this podcast" because it's similar to other ones and that helps share this message with other people without you having to really do too much. So it's kind of a nice easy way. And for those of you who do share it with friends and with family, I love that. Thank you so much. I think one of the best, biggest benefits of you sharing it is that if you and a friend both listen to the same podcast and then you sit down and talk about it, you're going to explore that topic. You're going to dive deeper. You're going to see how it impacts your own life, how it shows up in your life, and you're going to understand the concepts better. So it's a great resource to open up your ability to think more about it when you share it with somebody else.

02:26

Okay, and also I'm just going to put in a plug for some one-on-one coaching really quick. Two of my clients this last week as we've worked together have said, "oh my gosh, one-on-one coaching is a game changer." And I'll tell you what, the concepts we talk about here, I don't hold anything back. This is the kind of stuff that I talk about with all my clients with the things that we do, but having a one-on-one experience where I can take your specific experience and I can help you see what you're thinking, how you're engaging, what you're doing, and I can help you see things that you're not going to see just because you're in the thick of it. This is the reason that I have my own life coach, because they help me to see perspectives and ideas and understand things that I just don't on my own even with the skills that I have. My skills are really geared toward helping somebody else see their stuff.

03:16

So I have one client who's been to several of my classes. She has gone back and listened to most of my podcasts and yet this last week, she was, "like this is this is totally different This is so worth it. It's such a game changer." So if you feel like you're a little bit stuck, feel like "You know this like there are some tough things going on" that you're just not figuring out... One-on-one coaching is a brilliant brilliant opportunity to do that. So think about it, check it out, and you can get on my website, again tanyahale.com .You can go to the top tab that says "free consultation." You can get on my calendar, find a time that works for you, and we can sit down and chat about coaching and whether it would be a good fit for you or not. Personally, I think it's a good fit for everybody. I think everybody needs some coaching because It's just such a brilliant tool. I know that it has changed my life in such significant ways and I know that it changes the lives of my clients in significant ways as well. So if you think you'd be interested, get on, let's have a chat about it.

04:20

Okay, so today we are talking about the love language problem. And I'm gonna tell you about the problem that I had with the love languages when I was younger. So in 1992 Gary Chapman came out with a book called "The Five Love Languages." And it was kind of a big deal for us in our early marriages, for those of you whoaAre about my same age. I got married in and it took took probably me probably five or six years to find this book, but that's about when it came out. So if you're not familiar with this book, the basic premise is that love is felt and expressed in five different ways. And those are words of affirmation, quality time, receiving gifts, acts of service, and physical touch. And basically what he says is that we speak different love languages. And these are the five ways that love is felt or expressed. And if people in your life speak a different love language than you do, then that's what causes a lot of our miscommunication. So for example, if my primary love language is acts of service and my spouse's is receiving gifts, then I can do acts of service for him all day long, and he can give me gifts all day long, but we both end up feeling unloved, like we're not getting the love that we want or the love that we need. And also in that particular example I just gave you, my most natural way of trying to show the person that I love them would be to do acts of service his most natural way would be to give gifts. So that's what comes most easily for us and and that's what causes the disconnect: is then he might be doing something that he thinks is very loving and I don't interpret it as loving. So learning to speak the love language of the people around you is Important to having a more loving relationship. That's the premise of his book.

06:24

The book was a big hit. I loved it. But I'll tell you what I think part of the reason I loved it is the problem that I have seen with the concept. I used the concept of the love languages as a tool to continually accuse my former husband of not loving me. I could very easily move into a place of blame rather than a place of responsibility. And I know for sure that I was not alone in how I used this concept. This is how it would generally play out for me: I would ask my husband to do something for me. Sometimes it could have been something small like getting me a glass of water, or sometimes it was something more like doing a big project around the house, and then I used his response as a way to gauge how much he loved me. Okay, if he did it, if he did these acts of service, then I could feel secure because then he loved me, right? If he didn't, then well, of course I made that mean that he didn't love me or didn't love me enough to do something for me and then this would become a point of contention for us.

 07:31

 Let's put it in a thought model to show you how. So the circumstance: He wouldn't do the thing that I asked, he wouldn't do the act of service. Thought: he doesn't love me. He doesn't care about me. Feeling: for me, I would feel insecure. For my action: when I feel insecure, how does that show up in my behaviors? I would seek validation. I would start stepping into passive aggressive behaviors. I might give him the cold shoulder. I might emotionally or physically disengage. And result: I'm not being loving to him. Okay. Notice that my thought was, "he doesn't love me. He doesn't care about me." My result: I'm not being loving to him. I'm not caring about him. Our thoughts end up in our result line. See how that works? That's a little bit of crazy-making right there. It's crazy how our brain works these things when we think these kinds of thoughts.

08:37

The other way that I would use the love languages as a weapon is that I would expect my former husband to show up in ways that were not him. Now I'm not saying that we don't do that in marriages, but it's the expectation that was causing all the problems. He could show up loving in other ways, but because he wasn't doing it in the way that I thought he should, notice the "should", it wasn't good enough. I expected him to show me love in the ways that I wanted it and I discounted anything that wasn't that. The joy of relationships in your 20s, right? It is so painful for me to look back on and to see this dysfunctional thinking.

 09:23

So although the concept of having different love languages was insightful and probably a little bit groundbreaking at the time, I was using it in a way that was destroying my relationship rather than in a way that was growing my relationship. And I'm pretty sure that's not what Gary Chapman had in mind when he put this book out into the world and yet that's what happened for many of us. I know I frequently talk about how much I love middle age, and this is why: things like this start to make sense. For me particularly, I am loving what I've learned about love and what I continue to learn about love as I grow older.

10:03

So here's something I wish that I would have understand from Gary Chapman's book. This concept isn't about our spouse and how they treat us. It's about us and about how we are showing up in the relationship. And although he teaches it, it wasn't the message that I walked away with and that's because I was desperately looking for some way to ease my pain of not feeling loved. And I felt it was my husband's job to make me feel loved. And that's the first thing we're going to talk about today in regards to this. Love is an inside job. Feeling love is my responsibility and nobody can make me feel loved. Now I know that this this goes against so much of the social conditioning that we have. In fact, we even use phrase like, "I feel so loved." We don't. Just so you know, we create that love. When we say "I feel loved by somebody else", that doesn't happen. Love is something that I create in my own body with my own thoughts. And no matter how much of it I produce for another person, I can't make that love jump out of my body and into theirs so that they feel my love. It just doesn't work that way. Now, the love that I feel will show up in my actions and my actions go into their circumstance line and then they can interpret that as love if they want to, regardless of what they think about it. But... I can't have a feeling in my body and make somebody else feel it. Many of us have had an angry teenager accuses of not loving them. And most of us would just go, "oh my gosh, come on, you know I love you". We do love them and we do a lot of loving things for them. So why don't they feel it? If what I did could go into their body, they would know that I love them. Right? It is all in their thoughts. No matter how much we love them, if they don't want to see it, we cannot make them see it.

12:30

Here's how this works. I can put actions into their circumstance line and that's all I can do. Then they get to create a thought, a feeling, and an action of their own from that. Even if I rearrange my schedule and work things out so that I can do something for them and they know about it, they may choose to disregard that and think only of the fact that I would not allow them to go somewhere they wanted to go last weekend. So we can say or do loving things. We can put loving things in their circumstance line and they can still think, "she just hates me. She won't let me do anything. She just wants to ruin my life." The problem is not that we don't feel love for them or even that we're not doing loving things for them. The problem is that they are choosing to interpret our behaviors as unloving and this absolutely happens in marriage as well, all the time. I'm sure my former husband was doing a lot of kind and loving things, but I was unable to see and acknowledge them and I would dare say it probably went the other way. I did a lot of things that I thought were kind and loving and he wasn't able to see and acknowledge them either. We cannot make anyone feel our love. Even God cannot make us feel His love. So what happens when we do feel like somebody loves us. When we say, "oh, I just know that they love me." It's because we're thinking a thought like, "this person really loves me. This person is really putting themselves out there. I'm so grateful this person is showing up this way for me." Those thoughts then create the feelings of love, but we don't feel their love. We feel our love, love that we are creating from our thoughts. We have to open our minds to see this. And the thing is, strangely enough, so many of us are so desperate to feel love and then we choose not to feel love at the same time because we think it will come from a place outside of us rather than understanding that it comes from a place inside of us.

14:46

So we don't do the work to create the feeling of love. If we're not feeling love, that is an us problem. Now, I'm not saying that people are always putting loving behaviors into our circumstance line, and we're just not seeing it, or that people should put unkind, thoughtless behaviors into our circumstance line, and we should interpret it as loving. Sometimes people are going to put hurtful, unkind behaviors in our circumstance line. But either way, what we feel is our responsibility. Either we feel unloved, because of our erroneous thoughts that take us there, or maybe they are their real thoughts, maybe they're true thought, but we're, but we're feeling it because of our thoughts, or maybe they were unkind and we feel hurt, but then as well, we're responsible for how to work through the hurt. Our thoughts about the things that they are putting in our circumstance line; we're always responsible for that. And here's one thing that I have come to understand the last few years. Most people don't intentionally put hurtful and unkind things into our circumstance line, especially our spouses. Generally, we're trying to have a good relationship here. We just get caught in patterns of behavior that we're just not even noticing. And those patterns of behavior are dysfunctional and hurtful. Are we all thoughtless? Of course we are. Do we all get distracted and don't invest in our relationship the way that we wish we would? Definitely we do, but most of us don't do it on purpose. We just are humans, right? And so learning to have softer, kinder thoughts toward people when the things that they put in our circumstance line are a little bit tough is always going to be beneficial.

16:48

 Now, that's not to say, if you're being abused, in some way that we think, "oh, it's okay. They still just love me." No, I'm not talking about that kind of behavior that goes in our circumstance line. I'm talking about patterns where we just, we're distracted. We're not even paying attention to what's going on. So here's another thought about love that I want to share with you that I've connected to the last couple of months that has been life-changing. This is an Adam Miller quote from a podcast that I heard him in a couple of months ago. And though it's not a new thought for me, I just loved his phrasing. I loved what he says. He says, "Love is not a reward. Love is the law.". So that's what he says. So love is not what we get after obeying the commandments and then God rewards us with love. God's love is just there. He loves us always, regardless of what we do and regardless of whether we "feel" his love. We don't earn his love. It's not a reward. It's just always there. And the same thing applies for our earthly relationships. Because people can't make the love they feel jump over into our bodies, love from other people is not a reward either. We can't earn it in order to feel it. Love is not something we get from someone else. It's not a reward. This can be a really tough concept to wrap our brains around because of the social conditioning in pretty much every aspect of our lives, for our whole lives. But I want you to really try and give this some space in your brain. Love is something that we create within ourselves. Love is the commandment that God gives us. To learn to love. The greatest commandments are to love God, to love others, to love ourselves. That is the law. Notice the greatest commandment is not to receive love. Love is the law. It is the commandment.

19:01

So as Adam Miller talked about this, I loved another concept that he shared. He pointed out that in our marriages, as soon as we start focusing on getting love, on thinking that it's something we deserve from the other person, on thinking about how they are showing up with love or not, that's when our marriage relationships really start to struggle. Because the focus of marriage isn't to receive love. The law is not to receive love. The focus of marriage, the law is to learn to love better. Just as the focusing of parenting isn't to receive love, it's to learn how to love. There are a lot of years in parenting when our children can feel a lot more disdain for us than they feel love. We know we don't invite them into our lives so that we can feel their love. We invite them in so we can learn to love better. When we go into any personal relationship thinking that it's all about the love that they will give us, we are going to have a relationship that struggles. Because inevitably the other person will not show up how we expected. They will say or do something hurtful. They will forget an important date or appointment. The goal of our personal relationships is to increase our own capacity to create love for the other person. It is not to receive love from them. It is to learn how to offer grace and kindness when things don't go the way we anticipated. It is to learn to be patient when the other person is struggling. Love is the law. It isn't the reward. Love is what we are commanded to figure out and feel for others, not the reward that we receive from others. In so much of our social conditioning we have been taught to think in terms of other people loving us, of how we deserve to be loved, and how that gives us the strength to do hard things. Lovely thoughts, right? And let's say having people in our lives who do love us and show up amazing in our circumstance line...That's an incredible blessing. I am not discounting that at all. I've absolutely realized that with my marriage to Sione. It's a great blessing. But that isn't the biggest purpose of marriage or having children or any relationship really. The biggest purpose is to have a lot of opportunities to implement the law of love, to learn for ourselves how to love more deeply more completely more cleanly.

21:44

This is what relationships offer us. We can't control how anyone else shows up, whether they are kind or neglectful, annoying or loving, and still how we feel in response to how they show up again is in our control because our feelings are created by our thoughts So if you are feeling unloved in a relationship first, it's because of what you're thinking and Second, it's because you're focusing on the wrong thing. It will be really helpful to reframe it and ask, "what am I doing to show love?" rather than "how are they showing me love?" Asking "how can I love better? What does this situation have to teach me about being more loving?" Remember your loving feelings come from your thoughts. If you are struggling to feel love for the other person, check your thoughts.

22:43

In relationships that are challenging, our thoughts can do a lot of damage. Maybe our spouse is distracted when we get home and doesn't greet us the way that we would want. Check your thoughts. Fear will go into thoughts such as "they don't care that I'm home" or "I don't matter to them" or "here we go again." And then notice the emotion that those thoughts bring up: feelings of anger, frustration, loneliness, insignificance, unimportance, unloved. And then how do we show up? Notice we have that thought, and then we have that emotion, and then our actions. We emotionally or physically disengage. We might make a snarky comment. We might give them the silent treatment. We might start slamming doors or dishes. We might start accusing them of something else. The end result, we're not showing them that they matter to us. This is a crazy park. They do matter to us. That's why we're in a relationship with them. That's why it hurts. when they don't greet us warmly, and then we have thoughts like, "they don't care that I'm home," or that "I don't matter to them", or "here we go again." That's why it hurts. Of course it's going to hurt when we have those kinds of thoughts. And we end up responding by doing things that don't show them that they matter to us. And then that goes into their circumstance line, and they have hurtful thoughts. And then, I mean, around and around we go. Both of us desperate to be seen, to feel love, both of us engaging in behaviors that push the other person away. We end up not doing our own work in the relationship of learning to love better.

24:31

So, if our spouse is distracted when we get home and doesn't greet us the way we would want, think about what thoughts would create love. "Oh, I'm just going to go find them and connect. I'm going to go find them and give them a kiss or give them a hug. I just miss them. I just want to have them here. They look like they've had a rough day. What can I do for them? She or he works so hard. I'm so thankful for them." Love offers grace. Love gives people so much space to be human. And this is where the growth comes from. So often, we have programmed patterns of behavior that want to go to fear, to blaming, to accusing, to expecting. And these don't generally create loving thoughts and feelings and behaviors. Instead, they breed disconnect, discontent, disillusionment. Creating new patterns of behavior is such an intentional effort. And honestly, it is some of the most difficult work you will do. Promise it so hard. That's why so many of us don't do it and just can't continue to show up in hurtful and dysfunctional patterns. But when we start shifting our thoughts from, "I deserve" to "I choose," we start feeling empowered. "I deserve" is a statement that is very victim -ishy. It says that someone else should, notice this "should," be treating us a certain way, and that we can't feel better until they do. Instead, when we choose to show up with love, when we focus on learning how to love better, everything will start to shift. "I choose to love" instead of "I deserve to be loved."

26:34

When we make loving others, our focus, not receiving love, remember, but giving love, things start to change. We are expending efforts in areas that we can control rather than in areas that we can't. We cannot control whether another person loves us or how they show up in our circumstance line. But we can control whether we love ourselves and whether we love others. Letting go of things we can't control always increases our feelings of empowerment and when we feel powerless, our fear increases and our primitive brain gets louder and louder and our dysfunctional patterns of behavior becomes stronger and stronger. So when we're focused on whether the other person loves us or not we unconsciously move into dysfunctional patterns of behavior.

27:25

Conversely when we focus on how we are choosing to love, we act intentionally from our prefrontal cortex. And then we feel empowered because we're choosing. So scarcity and abundant thinking are also at play here. When we are focused on" how are they showing me love? Why aren't they loving me?" Again, we trigger the fear in the primitive brain When we are focused on how we can love them how we can show more love today We step into the power of our prefrontal cortex We are focused on finding solutions rather than obsessing about the problem And that is a trap that I fell into with the love languages. I was so focused on what I saw as the problem of him not loving me the way that I wanted to be loved, that I couldn't focus on the solution of learning how to show up in ways that felt meaningful for him and creating that loving feeling within myself.

 28:31

And this leads us to the last little bit I want to talk about today. The true value of the love languages is knowing how we can show up for the other person in our relationship We get to control our actions that go into their circumstance line. If I know the other person's love language is receiving gifts, it might take some planning, it might take going out of my comfort zone, but I can absolutely make a small gift part of my week. When I start each day by asking, "what can I do today to show this person I love them?" then love languages can come into play by helping to inform us as to the things that they would really connect with. "What things would make it easy for them to have loving thoughts?" It may not feel entirely comfortable for us because it's not our natural, but our goal is to step into loving thoughts, feelings, and behaviors more often. We want to put actions into their circumstance line that make it easier for them to think loving thoughts. If you're ready to argue that doing their love language doesn't feel authentic to you, I suggest you ask yourself a couple of questions just to flesh this out. One, does it go against your values? Or, does it just feel vulnerable and uncomfortable? Going against your values is one thing. But just feeling vulnerable and uncomfortable? Well, that's kind of part of being in a relationship. We go do activities with them because we love them and want to spend time with them, not always because we love the activity. We choose to show up in loving ways, ways that let them know that they are important to us.

30:22

So the love languages can help us show up more loving and help us to feel more love for them. In which case, then we interpret things differently as well. But when the love languages are used as a manual for how the other person should show up, notice the "shoulds" always causing problems, then they can become a weapon we use to beat the other person down and we actually feel less love, less connection, which again is the opposite of what we are so desperate to feel in the first place. Feeling love is a choice. It comes from inside of us and not outside of us. And once we can wrap our brains around this idea, everything changes. Everything changes. It's amazing. When we step into our relationship saying, "how can I love better? I want to love this person like I've never loved, like they've never been loved before." Everything changes.

31:32

I love, love, love growing up and seeing these things more clearly. How I interpreted this concept in my twenties was damaging and dysfunctional. And the clarity of vision that we can receive during middle age is incredible to me because we start putting the pieces together. And I'll tell you what, you being here, you striving to learn this information and incorporate this information, is an incredible thing of growing up into middle age. We're figuring it out, my friends. And it's brilliant. And it's amazing. And it is life-changing. Thanks for being here. Have a really, really amazing, great week. And don't forget to go to tanyahill.com and sign up for the "weekend win" if you want to make sure that you find out about the classes that I've got coming up soon, the group coaching classes. Don't have titles on those yet, but they're going to be great, promise you. Okay, have an awesome, awesome week and I'll see you next time. Bye.

32:37

Thank you so much for joining me today. If you would love to receive some weekend motivation, be sure to sign up for my free "weekend win" Friday email. A short and quick message to help you have a better weekend and position yourself for a more productive week. Go to tanyahale.com to sign up and learn more about life coaching and how it can help you get to your best self ever. See ya!