when people say relationship is hard the only really hard part about of a good relationship is just dealing with oneself and making sure that you're staying in that mode of caretaking because i do believe that if one is mainly focused on taking good care of the other person provided they're also focused on taking good care of you to some extent and we're good at taking care of ourselves everybody flourishes everything gets better but no i don't think i experienced that until fairly recently um what do you think is the uh secret to a successful relationship
there isn't just one but at at least at in the top five is master or at least be good at autonomic self-regulation know how to calm yourself down don't expect the like looking to anything external to soothe yourself is it puts you in a terrible position to to be a caretaker of yourself and other people right so learn how to self-soothe right learn how to calm your mind steady your actions steady your voice there are tools to do that we talk about on the podcast but elsewhere have that in place i also think that if
if your main focus is on you want to have good boundaries etc but on tending to the relationship doing a little bit more than you think you ought to do if everyone does that it goes great i mean i'm sometimes so positively struck by how supported i feel um because for many years i was just kind of doing everything on my own so any little thing i'm like oh my goodness this feels huge and also i think the dynamics have to be right let's let's be really honest this is a little bit of a tricky
topic but um there is a power dynamic in relationships sometimes not all but in some relationships it works much better if one person leads and the other person follows in other relationships it's more mutuality works best people need to know what they need and so knowing what you need and what you crave is really important and then once you do that you can create the relationship you want i've seen that over and over again and people are different um but i think that um ultimately i mean right it's it's there's the dopamine phase of a
relationship and then there's the serotonin phase the kind of more mutuality coziness and sweetness there's a great book about how to make sure that the dopamine component and the serotonin component so to speak go on forever and it has to do with you know when you first meet someone you're attracted to them you're essentially objectifying them you meaning not in the way people might think you are not dependent on them for emotional stability or survival as you get close with somebody you really come to depend on them and then you tend to objectify them less
and so this book the book is the name is kind of corny but it's written by an analyst again it's called can love last and it's a book about how really good strong relationships are the consequence of people constantly moving through this dependency objectification dynamic and i use those words in the true the psychological sense not in the way they're typically thrown around nowadays so the id you know in some cultures men and women will only touch for two weeks out of the month and then for the other two weeks the excitement and the sensuality
and all and the sexuality is very heightened and then they go back to this kind of distancing now i don't think that's feasible for most people but if you look statistically those relationships tend to last a very long time with at least reported mutual feelings of intense attraction for many many many decades so human beings need to learn how to at least understand and control these dynamics there's a lot of divorce there's a lot of cheating there's a lot of stuff out there it'd be great if people could resolve some of this stuff inside of
the relationship in my opinion yeah and this kind of intense attraction i there's uh actually uh one of the poems that carl uh daiseroth introduced me to i think two english poems is the name but one of the things i find myself for prolonged periods being attracted to is like you notice some kind of magic and you keep wanting to dig to the depths like of that magic you're trying to really know that person to really know a person deeply yeah you notice something yeah early on sure i don't know what that is but you
just notice something special and you want to keep pulling at that thread and you never really do well you also have to be careful you know i get a lot of questions from god you have to be careful the questions you ask in a relationship too you have to make sure you really want that information and it's not just about people's past right if you ask somebody how they really feel about something about you and they tell you that may be soothing it may be intensely stressful you have to be here's one thing i know
for sure for a relationship to work you have to be brave you can't go in there fully protected and yet you also can't go in there with no boundaries because you'll end up beat up what's that quote if you want to be a warrior prepare to get hurt if you want to be an explorer prepared to get lost and if you want to be both you know and if you become a lover prepare to beat both or something something like that i forget this is one of these instagram type things that you see passing by
and you know it's pretty true love love scary because it takes us back to that primitive circuitry that is as primitive and basic as hunger thirst the desire for heat when we're cold the desire for cold when we're overly warm it's a it's dinorphin i mean when somebody leaves like the you know when somebody you were attached to leaves by death or by decision or you're forced apart the dynorphin release is massive it is true discomfort people feel anxiety and discomfort and moving through that is a hell of a process i mean if i knew
how to best break up at a neurological level or if you could just plug yourself into a wall and reset i mean i'd i'd do that episode tomorrow but we don't have that knowledge come on the uh i think we've covered this before and it's even been mimified i think losing love is part of the magic of love it means you've felt something i agree but at some point like have you done it enough times you know life is finite you know it is beautiful to see these couples that seem very much in love despite
many years despite having been together many years yeah the way they look at each other yeah they'll say they still see the magic yeah and they'll say we got lucky or it was it's been hard or this and that i think external conditions being a little tougher is helpful for a couple hardship i do i do because i think that you rally you know you you and you bond with people you know being obviously you want to survive those conditions but um yeah i do i think that bonnie and clyde so and they were a
little a little too much well a little bit too much they were sociopaths but the uh well when two sociopaths [ __ ] can make you do crazy normally it's interesting normally sociopaths don't team up because they because they manipulate each other sociopaths sadly are um are usually only interested in manipulating the highly pliable or unsuspecting but when romantic attraction is woven in then it gets really diabolical you
