Welcome to the fourth episode of Season Three of Wisdom for Wellbeing Podcast. On this episode I interview Jordan Green, Licensed Clinical Therapist.

Love is a precious human experiences, and is so very much related to heartache, one of the more painful human experiences! Jordan Green is a prolific educator in this area, and is heartfelt in her approach to supporting her community and clients to cultivating wellbeing in their lives, including successful relationships. Of course, given the topic this episode is applicable to all of us as we navigate this being human in relationship.

Want to keep in touch? Head to @drkaitlin on Instagram or @wisdomforwellbeingpod on Facebook to connect.

What is covered in this episode:

>>You can tell your partner’s love language without directly asking them by noticing the area in which they complain about the most because it usually indicates how they would like to receive love.

>>Using “I” statements instead of “You” statements such as “I feel __ about __” or “I need ___” instead of “you didn’t do___” because it holds a sense of responsibility and helps the partner feel safe by directly expressing our needs instead of expecting our partners to read our minds. Directly communicating sets the partnership up for success by having a clear idea of how to better support each other.

>>Once the sympathetic nervous system is activated, the heart rate will speed up and we might start to feel agitated. It’s recommended to take a 20 minute break once we start feeling like this because it is the average amount of time for our nervous system to return back to a baseline to get our parasympathetic system back online. Another tip is to exhale longer than the inhale which can help with relaxation.

>>Attachment styles are fluid and can show up differently with each relationship. Working to develop a secure attachment is through processing past trauma, processing grief and anger, reparenting ourselves, and building self-trust.

>>Internal Family Systems Theory is the idea that all parts of us have good intent even if it might be self-destructive, it’s an adaptive response to protect us from certain hurt, pain, or trauma and recognizing that it isn’t helpful to us right now.

>>Writing a love letter to yourself as an exercise of empathising and validating your own feelings is a practice in self-acceptance and showing yourself love.

Links Discussed

• @the.love.therapist on Instagram
• jordanandrea.com
• Join The Love Group: a private community of support started by Jordan to learn more about relationships, self-love, and mental wellness
• The 5 Love Languages

Transcript

Jordan Green: No love, like I said, so foundational it’s like the one thing that we as humans, as animals that we all need and that really truly connects us both with ourselves and with others.

Intro: You’re listening to the Wisdom for Wellbeing Podcast, the show that blends science and heart to bring you evidence-based tips and tricks for cultivating a healthy, wealthy, and meaningful life. Now, here’s your host, therapist, Yogi, and fellow full-life balancer, Dr. Kaitlin Harkess.

Kaitlin Harkess: Hi there, welcome back to Wisdom for Wellbeing. We are talking all things love and relationship today. You know, it’s perhaps some appropriate timing that we’ve just gotten through the Valentine’s day period or whatever that means or does not mean to you. So today we’re talking with the amazing Jordan Green. Jordan is a licensed clinical therapist in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and in addition to her work with individuals and couples, Jordan provides inspirational and educational content on love and relationships on her therapy Instagram page. She is known as @the.love.therapist and she publishes there with really wonderful, useful tips and tricks quite prolifically. She’s actually got over a hundred and seventy thousand followers there. She’s also opened up a number of new resources including a membership site so you can head to jordanandrea.com and check out her love therapist resources there too. Of course, all of this will be linked in the show notes. But without further ado, let me introduce you to Jordan now.

Kaitlin Harkess: Hi Jordan, welcome to the Wisdom for Wellbeing Podcast. I am delighted to have you here today, thank you so much for coming on the show with us.

Jordan Green: Thank you so much for having me. I’m really excited to be here.

Kaitlin Harkess: And we have such a fantastic conversation around you know relationships and how we communicate, manage conflict plan. But I guess just to start, would you mind sharing with listeners a little bit about who you are and the amazing work that you’re doing?

Jordan Green: Yeah, so I am a licensed therapist and a coach. I am started doing therapy a few years ago after my undergraduate. I didn’t know what I wanted to do and both my mom and my stepmom are therapists and I realized that I kind of I think I might have subconsciously knew for most of my life that that’s what I wanted to do, but I never really liked truly admitted it to myself and so I went to grad school and I started working with people. I would work with individuals, couples, and families doing counseling here in Tulsa, Oklahoma and about a year ago, I expanded and I realized that that all of this time that I was spending helping people was amazing. I love doing the individual work, but I realized that I could be helping so many more people. And so I created the therapy Instagram account the.love.therapist and it’s grown and expanded and so I’ve started doing a lot of other fun kind of creative stuff through that more recently.

Kaitlin Harkess: And this is particularly important for listers. So the.love.therapist on Instagram, go and connect with Jordan there because the account is amazing and love is a really key message. I think in all of the work that you’re doing.

Jordan Green: Yeah. Yeah it is. It’s like kind of like the center, the foundation of everything that I talk about, everything that I do, especially on this page.

Kaitlin Harkess: Why is love so important for you? And you know, it probably is for a lot of us, but maybe if you’re able to articulate what it means for you that would be connecting for us.

Jordan Green: Yeah, I think you know love like I said, it’s so foundational. It’s like the one thing that we as humans, as animals that we all need and that really truly connects us both with ourselves and with others and love is such a powerful healing force and I realized throughout my life that true healing only happens through love and since love, I’ve just realized it’s such a powerful healing force and so that’s that’s why love it’s just like love is everything that is important in life is love.

Kaitlin Harkess: You know, it’s interesting so I’ve heard this from a number of different people who work in sort of the therapeutic field. And love, you know, described as healing like how powerful and when you mention humans and animals sort of before we started the interview. We were both talking about our cats being a little bit needy in attention and you know, you have a new puppy and you know in regards to this primal connecting, I think that’s an incredibly powerful vantage point and way of way of framing it for us.

Jordan Green: Yeah. Yeah. I mean they’ve done studies on babies or children who don’t receive love and how that affects their health, how that affects their well-being their development. And we I’m we all just need love, we all need love so so much and yeah, there are so many, so many when we don’t receive that love it’s it’s doesn’t feel good right?

Kaitlin Harkess: No and painful.

Jordan Green: It’s painful and you know we’re talking about relationships today and a lot of the conflict in relationships, I believe, is just because we don’t feel truly seen or heard or loved. There’s just that misunderstanding, that disconnect there. And so the more that we can show love, express love, the more we allow ourselves to receive love, usually the healthier our relationships are.

Kaitlin Harkess: That’s really important. And I guess with that, should we start with maybe talking about what are some common communication difficulties, you know, whether it is expressing love or kind of showing love. Where where would some common communication difficulties lie? Because it’s different, you know, when we’re kids, we might ask for a hug or cry or you know cling on to Mom or Dad’s legs or something but as we get older, we communicate things differently and it’s not just about love, is it? It’s communicating about a relationship which has so many dimensions.

Jordan Green: Yeah, that’s such a great point. You mentioned kind of as children, we tend to communicate more non-verbally and that’s that’s so true. Like Studies have shown that anywhere between seventy and ninety three percent of our communication is nonverbal. And so we talked about communication a lot and learning how to communicate and typically when when we say that word communication, I think, you know, I my mind goes to directly to words like using words to communicate but I realized more recently the importance of that nonverbal communication in learning how to communicate effectively in a nonverbal way as well. Whether it’s making eye contact, turning towards someone you know, what does your posture look like? Are you open or are your arms crossed and kind of shut down? And and so you asked about communication difficulties. I think a big one is not truly listening. Like not a lot of us don’t learn how to truly listen to others and like we talked about, a lot of conflict is about not feeling seen and not feeling heard and we don’t feel seen and heard we don’t feel loved and so something that I’m seeing more and more of nowadays is people on their phones, watching TV or just caught up in their own minds when someone’s talking to them and they’re not truly present or listening and if you just think about like, how does it make you feel when you’re talking to someone? Or you’re trying to get their attention and they’re not listening. They’re just completely distracted. It probably makes you feel like super invalidated and misunderstood and like they don’t care about you. And so when you’re not listening, you’re not giving someone your full attention, you’re turning away from them and in couples work, we call this turning away from bids for connection and a bid for connection’s basically an attempt to get your attention and it’s something as simple as asking, how was your day? Saying, hey check this out over here, like did you see this? or asking someone a question and there is an Institute called The Gottman Institute and they’ve done research on thousands of couples and when they did research on this topic, they found that about, I think it was six years, they studied couple six years after their wedding and couples who divorced, they had only turned toward each other during this study 33% of the time, which means that they were turning away from their partner, which means like they weren’t like responding when their partner was trying to get their attention. They weren’t making eye contact. They were just turning away from them 67 percent of the time, which is a lot. Like if that’s over half the time, they weren’t giving their partner their attention when their partner was seeking it. And so the couples who stayed together in this study, turned towards each other 86 percent of the time. So the point of that like what that study showed me is like if your partner wants your attention, if someone wants your attention, give it to them. Like show people that you respect them and care about them by putting your phone down and you know turning away from what you’re doing and giving them your full attention, it’s something that’s so simple but can have a huge huge huge impact on your relationships.

Kaitlin Harkess: That’s incredible. And those are incredible statistics and it’s so interesting when you mentioned in the very beginning, you know body language, that this is something we kind of grow up may be demonstrating that suddenly our phones, or our heads or minds or whatever it may be are grabbing us in here turning towards and actually engaging with our partner is one of the most protective things of of our relationship.

Jordan Green: Yeah, and it’s you know, it’s so simple and you can see it you’ll notice like if you go to restaurants or just in public or at the airport and just people watch and you know, what are what are people doing? If they’re kids trying to get their attention, if their partner’s trying to get their attention, if their friends trying to get their attention, are they putting what they’re doing down and giving them their full attention? Are they distracted looking elsewhere? Are they ignoring them? Are they responding? And it’s you’ll you can learn a lot about a person and a lot about someone’s dynamics just by kind of observing the very simple things in their behavior and whether or not they’re turning towards each other.

Kaitlin Harkess: It also indicates to me, you know, when we’re saying love like this sounds like a verb like a doing like showing love by showing attention.

Jordan Green: Yeah. Yeah. I often say love’s a verb, love’s of verb and you know, we show our love through action and it’s daily action, right? Like it takes effort to actually express that love and show that we can feel it but the the key here is learning how to communicate that, how to communicate it also in a way that helps our partner to feel loved. I don’t know if you’ve heard of the five love languages.

Kaitlin Harkess: Yeah, would you be able to describe that for listeners? Because it’s brilliant.

Jordan Green: It’s a concept that was founded by someone named Gary Chapman, and I’m pretty sure he’s a chaplain but he has come up with what he calls the five love languages and what they are are basically he’s broken it down into these are five ways that we express love and that we feel loved. And so the first one, let’s see there are five of them, one is acts of service which is like doing something nice for someone whether it’s you know, taking out the trash or making them a meal, another one is giving gifts, the third one is quality time. So the attention thing is a big one for quality time. Just giving someone your attention making efforts to make time for them and giving them your full attention when you’re with them. The fourth one is words of affirmation. So if words of affirmation is one of your top Love Languages, you really love to receive compliments and just communication is super important and the fifth one…

Kaitlin Harkess: Physical touch, maybe?

Jordan Green: Physical touch, yeah, that’s a big one, physical touch yeah and just you know, I think we all you know physical touch is so important.

Kaitlin Harkess: And so with those love languages because that comes back to communication then doesn’t it? Like that people, you know are speaking and you know I can’t show everyone the air quotes right now, but speaking different languages. So how do we kind of communicate taking this into account or what will we need to know or do to use this information?

Jordan Green: So the website thefivelovelanguages.com, they have a quiz where you can take the quiz, it’s a free quiz and figure out what are my top love languages? And you can also think about what are some of the things I complain about the most? And if you’re trying to get like what’s your partner’s love language without directly asking them, usually the thing that you’ll notice some complaining about the most is the thing that they are, the area in which they’re not feeling loved and how they’re wanting to receive love. So for example, if someone’s always complaining about the dishes like my guess would be their Love Language is acts of service. If someone’s complaining like you never tell me you love me and the other person’s like yeah. I say, I love you all the time. I’m guessing their love language is words of affirmation, right? Because they’re wanting to receive that love in a verbal way and so I’m just thinking about what are some of the ways that I received love? What are some of the ways that my partner likes to receive love? Or my child? Or I think he’s written a book for children as well for families. It totally changed my relationship with my dad when I started thinking about, okay. What is his love language? How does he like to receive love? And when I was able to start expressing that in a way that love in a way that he actually felt like he could receive it. I feel like it really improved and helped our relationship a lot.

Kaitlin Harkess: It’s pretty incredible because it shows it’s you know, when we were talking about relationship communication often, we kind of go romantic relationships, but it’s our relationships as a whole that affect our well-being and our health. It’s not it’s not strictly romantic. It’s our family relationships, our friendships, relationships at work too.

Jordan Green: Yeah, a lot of what we’re talking about applies to all kinds of relationships.

Kaitlin Harkess: Yeah. So Jordan, we’ve got sort of like turning towards and like listening and connecting with people figuring out the love language. Are there any other communication difficulties that people commonly have or you know, if they’re kind of going to use words or to articulate something that’s going on for them. Are there particular struggles that people maybe come up with more commonly? I’m sure there’s a plethora but any common ones?

Jordan Green: Another big one that I can think of is um like complaining. This is what I hear about a lot from couples is complaining and criticism. A lot of complaints are expressed as criticism, which immediately causes the other person to feel attacked, to get defensive. And so you’ll notice that a lot of complaints or criticisms start with you. Like you didn’t do the dishes or you forgot to do that or you don’t care about me and so just a really small little communication tip is instead of using you statements try using I statements and so a good formula that I teach my clients is I feel blank about blank. I need blank. And so when you’re communicating what you need it’s important to use an affirmative need which means that you say what you do want instead of what you don’t want. So an example would be I’m feeling overwhelmed, do you mind helping with the dishes tonight? Instead of like saying something like you don’t even care about me. You could say I need you to spend more time with me and ask me about my day, that would really help me to feel loved and so turning those you statements around and using those I statements helps to kind of take a hold a sense of responsibility and helps your the other partner to feel safe because you’re expressing directly what you need and that’s really important because a lot of times we’re really indirective or passive and how we communicate we just expect our partners to read our minds. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard, “I shouldn’t have to tell them what I need, they should just know” and I hear that all the time and then resentment builds up because they don’t know like the other person doesn’t know and they didn’t do what you were wanting but it’s really just because you never communicate with them about it. Right? And so I was I was actually talking with a couple about this yesterday and there was just this vital moment for them that they’ve been setting each other up to fail and by using I statements and directly communicating what they want and what they needed, they could start setting each other up for success. And so you’re essentially giving your partner a recipe for how they can support you and it’s just so important to be direct and open and transparent in our communication.

Kaitlin Harkess: It’s a really beautiful way of putting it, setting them up for success that you know, we might feel like by perhaps not being so direct that or being kinder or that being direct is scary or confrontational, but if it’s done with the method you described, the real affirmative in the I statements that we’re actually helping our partner help us and sort of move that relationship forward in a connecting successful manner.

Jordan Green: Yeah, and I’ve noticed a lot of times when people are like in conflict or they just feel like there’s a disagreement, they’re in attack defend mode. So there are sympathetic nervous systems are activated which means they’re in fight or flight. They’re usually trying to prove themselves right, they’re working against each other and when we feel attacked we get defensive and when we’re defensive, like when both people are hurt and feel self-righteous, the conversation just doesn’t go anywhere good and so it’s almost like you’re on two teams working against each other and I like to help people imagine that like when there’s something that you’re disagreeing about or you’re having trouble communicating about like think of yourself as being on the same team working together to find an answer and so you can each express your thoughts and your feelings without attack or defensiveness and it just creates a sense of safety and support and allows you to work together to find even if it’s just a mutual understanding, oftentimes, you know, we’re trying to work towards some sort of compromise. But even if it’s just finding mutual understanding, yeah, just working together on the same team.

Kaitlin Harkess: What a beautiful metaphor that like this partnership or relationship in whatever form is actually the team and then you know, the the problem is the external light trying to solve or find that mutual understanding like having that communication, that dialogue in that frame around working together with the difficult or against the difficulty rather than you each being the opposing side.

Jordan Green: Yeah, exactly. It really changes the dynamic of the conversation. It changes the tone and it just it creates a sense of emotional safety when you feel like okay, we’re working, we’re working together and sometimes we don’t you know, it helps to start the conversation in that way as you know, hey, maybe it’s even like hey I’m starting to feel a little bit resentful, can we, you know have a conversation about how I’m feeling and how we can work through this together and you know rather than hey, you know what you did, you know bothered me. I didn’t like it when you did this, you know, rather than kind of like this more of like me versus you, I need you to do, you know, you need to do something different for me. It’s like hey, this is kind of bothering me. Can we work together to work through this and to support each other?

Kaitlin Harkess: That’s really interesting so grabbing the language, listeners, around the like framing it as a together so that your partner is coming on board because you said, you know often we get into this attack defense mode in the sympathetic nervous system kind of comes online. Would you mind describing what that feels like? So that listeners kind of have a framework to go, oh I’m there or oh my partner might be there so we can work on regulating.

Jordan Green: Yeah, definitely. So typically we have two sides of our nervous system. We have the parasympathetic which is the rest and digest or it’s also kind of called the faith and social part of our nervous system because when we’re in the parasympathetic, our prefrontal cortex is online. We’re able to think rationally, we’re able to, we feel calm or able to communicate clearly. When our sympathetic nervous system is activated, a lot of times, like our heart rate will speed up. Sometimes we start to get a little bit hot. We will get warmer. We may start to feel agitated, our brain. Like our prefrontal cortex goes offline a little bit more so we’re not thinking as clearly, your brain may feel foggy. You may kind of go blank and sometimes you’ll feel nervous or jittery, but you’ll just notice that you that maybe you’re starting to feel upset. And so when we start to feel this way, I usually recommend for people to take a break and take a 20-minute break and I always recommend 20 minutes because that’s the average amount of time that it takes for our nervous system to return back to a baseline to really get our parasympathetic back online and to get back to that rest and digest, safe and social state and so taking a 20 minute break to just taking some deep breaths, go for a walk, listen to some calming music, or do whatever helps you to calm down before coming back to the conversation and approaching it in more of a calm and more of a calm state.

Kaitlin Harkess: Yeah that makes a lot of sense. So it’s like noticing when you’re starting to have these reactions and particularly with that prefrontal cortex kind of, you know, losing blood flow and you’re not thinking as clearly I imagine then it becomes harder to be as receptive in the conversation or to engage in the way that we might want to hold ourselves to and use some of these tips and tricks that you’re sharing with us today.

Jordan Green: Yeah, and so if you notice yourself, you know getting a little bit we call it flooded and getting flooded if your sympathetic nervous systems getting a little bit activated, you know, take some time to solve see, do some deep breaths when you extend your exhale longer than the inhale, it activates the parasympathetic nervous system. So it helps to helps you to relax. So take some deep breaths and extend your exhale. If you notice that your partner is starting to get activated or someone who you’re communicating with, offer just to like hey, let’s just take a break for a second. Let’s take some deep breaths together or just take a second to gather yourselves. We often call these like I call these repair attempts. Attempts to repair that connection, whether it’s repairing the connection with yourself and then repairing the connection with the other person so we can regulate or we can self-regulate our nervous systems or we can co-regulate which means like as babies, we were only able to co-regulate with an adult or with another person. Our nervous systems didn’t, we didn’t know how to self-regulate but as adults often we can learn how to coregulate so you can offer to co-regulate. Maybe that looks like a hug or offering to slow down and remind each other why you love each other when you’re getting upset or a compliment or you know, like bringing some humor into the conversation or offering to hold hands just any attempt to reconnect, slow down, remind yourselves that you’re on the same team, that you love each other and then you can move forward from there.

Kaitlin Harkess: That’s a really nice reminder that you know, we can we can do this regulation solo or together and that co-regulation is important to like that sense of we are looking out for our partner, we’re in it together. I imagine this is different for different people like this experience might be more or less intense depending on histories and personal characteristics and I guess with that would you be open to just maybe describing to listeners what attachment means? Because I imagine that comes up differently depending on attachment styles or you know histories for for each of us in relationship.

Jordan Green: Yeah, so it’s not attachment styles, attachment theory was founded by a psychologist named John Bowlby and he did some research with his colleague Mary Ainsworth on infant-parent relationships and that provided the framework for the different attachment-styles and so the basis of attachment theory is that our early childhood experiences form the foundation for our adult relationships and we develop attachment styles in response to how our adult caregivers interacted with us. And so we can see attachment like what is attachment? It’s just simply a bond with another person. So attachment styles describe how we bond to others and how we relate to them and our attachment begins as babies and it’s driven by our parents’ responsiveness to us and their ability to support and nurture and care for us. So if our caregivers were accessible and attentive, we formed what we call a secure or just a strong attachment and if our caregivers were not there for us when we needed them or if they showed up inconsistently, we would experience anxiety and that would lead to more of an insecure attachment style which would be an anxious attachment style or an avoidant or disorganized attachment style and in a lot of you know something I always like to mention is that attachment styles can, I like to think of attachment styles as a continuum because a lot of times we try to put ourselves into these boxes of like this is my attachment style, but they’re really very dynamic and fluid which means that they can change over time, they can change based on the context. So you may have one attachment style when it comes to like romantic relationships. You may have a different one in a different context when in more of like a work context or with family or with friends and there can also be a lot of like shame or guilt that people experience around like if they have an insecure attachment style and I always want to offer like some self compassion and just a different perspective that we are so adaptive in our attachment styles and our behaviors make total sense given our experiences. And so if you’ve experienced trauma, of course that you know changes the way that you move on to relate to others. And our attachment styles really describe how we seek safety.

Kaitlin Harkess: That’s a really important point that it’s safety-seeking and that it’s in response to something going on. So depending on difficulties or you know, easefulness that we’ve had in different contexts. We’re gonna change how we relate to others and it sounds like you’re saying it all makes a lot of sense and it’s something that we can shift and probably shift in the context of of love and then, you know a supportive relationship.

Jordan Green: Yeah, yeah, it’s definitely possible. If you have more of an avoidant or disorganized or anxious attachment style to develop more of a secure attachment because our way of relating to other people isn’t fixed, right? It’s like it’s we were changing beings, we’re always changing. And so especially if we’re putting some conscious intention toward our attachment style and taking certain small steps to heal and create new patterns, new habits. We can find secure well and especially like we can find security but especially if we have secure and responsive and respectful and we’re supported in loving relationships if we’re, we find other people who have secure attachment to relate to, have relationships that are supportive and safe. It helps us to learn to adapt and be and have more stability and security in how we’re relating to others. And so that’s why therapy can be really helpful. It’s a safe place to form secure attachments, to work through trauma, to learn skills for developing a secure attachment style.

Kaitlin Harkess: And with that then sort of sense of developing in a relationship whether it’s therapy or different, you know secure relationships we have in our lives, going back to that point you made around co-regulation is it this experience of being with someone who’s able to go through that period of managing, you know any sort of sympathetic nervous system fight or flight response we have with us so that we’re kind of learning that feeling and that process and that you know, there’s like a physical embodiment of it?

Jordan Green: Yeah exactly. If we are at you know, if we’re in a relationship with someone who is able to relate to us in a secure way, who’s nervous system is very regulated. It will help us to learn how to regulate a lot of the work in developing a secure attachment is also processing past trauma, processing grief and anger and other emotions, working on re-parenting ourselves and meeting our own needs and building self-trust. And it’s hard to build a secure attachment with someone else if we don’t have self-trust and so I’m building self-trust, healing shame, building our self-esteem, creating times for just play, like play with others especially as children if we didn’t have the opportunity to play, if we didn’t have a safe space to play if that environment was just not, didn’t allow for that playfulness. We can do that as adults, we can create time for fun and joy and creativity and play in our relationships and that can really help us to develop more of a secure attachment because we learned that you know play is safe. If we’re in a playful mood where we’re feeling safe, and another thing that really is important in learning to develop a secure attachment is learning how to set boundaries and then of course just like working on communication skills on how we communicate like we’ve been talking about today.

Kaitlin Harkess: Brilliant, I think that’s really important points and takeaways if anyone’s going, oh, maybe when I you know, try and bring up a conflict with my partner or a challenge or difficulty. I feel like my nervous system takes hold or I don’t necessarily have success with the I statements and the affirmative responses. Maybe it’s worth going, okay is something going on here? What do I need to do to regulate my nervous system and how do I go about this and kind of that connection of play and as you said re-parenting and you made a reference to self-compassion as well earlier, like this idea of you know, being kind and caring towards ourselves. Would would we be able to just talk through maybe how that can be cultivated? Because that regardless of our attachment style is such an important take away this re-parenting, self-compassion, showing up to ourselves with kindness the way we might want to be ideally showing up to others in relationship.

Jordan Green: Yeah. It’s interesting if we just observe, start to observe how you speak to yourself and observe the ways in which you like you you speak to yourself in your head, the ways in which you treat yourself, people always say like, do you treat yourself like someone that you love? Would you treat someone else the way that you say to someone else the things that you say to yourself? And I found that you know often times we tend to be very self-critical. Sometimes I’ll ask in our first session, I usually ask most of my clients like what are some of your strengths? What are some of the things that you love about yourself? And sometimes people can’t even come up with one thing that they love about themselves and that just shows that you know, perhaps we weren’t taught how to how to love ourselves how to speak kindly for ourselves, especially if we didn’t have caregivers or role models around us growing up who you know who truly loved themselves and demonstrated that self-care and that self-compassion. It’s something that we then have to learn and we have to practice and so if we notice ourselves being really hard on ourselves in certain ways, you know just having more of that self-compassion and that acceptance of okay, you know, I think self-compassion often starts with acceptance. Often times, we resist certain things about ourselves or certain ways that we are. Certain behaviors, and I you know, I like to talk about and with Internal Family Systems Theory as a model that I use a lot in my with my individual clients and one of like the very basic premises of individual Internal Family Systems is the idea that all of our parts have good intent. That they’re all trying to help us in some ways. So if there’s a part of us that we feel like is self-destructive or very critical, recognizing that it’s you know, it’s adapted it’s maybe there to try to protect us from certain hurt or pain or trauma and recognizing that it just it’s trying to help us, but maybe it’s way of doing that isn’t helpful right now, but even just recognizing that all of the different parts of us are adaptive, they’re trying to help us, maybe our strategies aren’t helpful, but can help us to have more self-compassion towards the part of us that maybe are highly critical or maybe there are certain like bad habits or self-destructive tendencies that we might have but having just more compassion.

Kaitlin Harkess: Could listeners maybe do this in like an exercise where they take away like after this podcast and maybe write down different sort of parts and kind of go oh okay, this is what I’m working with and just because you know these thoughts or judgments or whatever are coming up, it sounds like you’re saying well that was adaptive in a certain context, it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s true now or that it’s helpful now, but kind of holding it’s own little bubble or space or what could we do to kind of practice some of this?

Jordan Green: Yeah, and sometimes that helps I mean journaling is a great practice because it allows us to kind of see our thoughts externally on paper and it can help us to have more of like an understanding and perspective on what’s going on in our minds. So journaling is a really great practice for that and trying to maybe you know identify, are these parts trying to where are these parts trying to protect me? Are they protecting me? Like anxiety. Anxiety might be a protector if we have a part that we feel like is more controlling or has a hard time relaxing and letting go that would be a protective part. And so you’ll notice that a lot of your parts are just kind of trying to protect you in some way and and so maybe again maybe their strategies aren’t helpful. But it can that can help to bring more self-compassion and then of course well, and the another thing is that like a lot of these strategies, we think that change happens when when we’re critical of ourselves. We think well if I’m not criticizing myself or if I’m not being hard on myself for this or that then I’m not going to change and but the truth is that like we talked about in the very beginning of this podcast, I’ve learned healing happens through love. Change happens through love and so can we move towards you know, what we want rather than away from like instead of focusing on what we don’t want and what we’re trying to change, focusing on what we do want and you know changing through love for ourselves for through compassion for ourselves rather than through criticism. And so writing I always also one of my favorite practices is writing a love letter to yourself. That’s a really really good practice because even if you can’t come up with a list of things that you love about yourself, it can help us to kind of shift our perspective a little bit when we write a love letter to ourselves.

Kaitlin Harkess: That sounds beautiful and what a beautiful practice for listeners to be able to take away this idea that you know, we can’t, you know, antagonize or belittle ourselves into changing and shifting and connecting, but if we kind of love ourselves into it, that’s a real embraceful and compassionate, compassionate way of evoking change and grounding and a love letter sounds like a really beautiful and romantic way to way to start one’s relationship with oneself in a different, in a different light.

Jordan Green: Yeah. Yeah. It’s a really it’s a fun exercise to do and I you know, I like to make it a consistent practice right? We can write a love letter to ourselves once but what if you started a monthly practice of writing a love letter to yourself and the beautiful thing about love letters is like I said, even if you’re having trouble finding like tapping into love for yourself, it’s a way to even just practice acceptance or understanding of like, oh my gosh, I really see Jordan why you’re having why you’re having such a hard time right now. That’s so hard. You know, you are really going through a lot and just empathizing with yourself, empathizing is a great, you know, step towards validating your own feelings, empathizing, validating is a step towards acceptance and showing yourself love.

Kaitlin Harkess: So empathizing, kind of understanding what is going on for you and going, okay, well that makes sense. Like let’s let’s work with that. Let’s meet ourselves almost where we are. And then I imagine from The Love Letter we might start to show up a little bit differently and communicate a little bit differently than in our relationships, which will have then positive reinforcement in regards to how we’re engaging, connecting, and loving.

Jordan Green: Yeah, exactly.

Kaitlin Harkess: So where can listeners soak up more wisdom and connect specifically with you more?

Jordan Green: The best place to find and connect with me is on Instagram at @the.love.therapist I post every day and I post on my stories and I’ve been trying to jump on and do more lives and connect with people in more just intimate ways. It’s, Instagram has been one of my favorite places to just build community and because we get to connect with people from all over the world and so I’m also creating a little support group at the end of this month for the month of January because I just I want to create that space and that opportunity for my community and my followers to support each other to receive more support from me and to just get to know everyone better. So Instagram and then I also have a website jordanandrea.com where you can learn about the other services that I offer and just learn a little bit more about me on my website.

Kaitlin Harkess: Beautiful. So I’ll put the links to at thelove @the.love.therapist sorry, my dots came out all disorganized and jordanandrea. I’ll put those links in the show notes so listeners can easily connect in and also if you’re kind of going oh, this is something that’s really resonating, lookout for the support group because this episode will actually be going live in the New Year so the support group will be up and running and something that you can you know, take active steps to find community and connection and continue these conversations because this is as you said love is everything it’s such an important area of our lives. So why not invest in ourselves?

Jordan Green: Yeah. I totally agree. Thank you so much for having me on here today.

Kaitlin Harkess: An absolute pleasure. Thank you for your time.

Kaitlin Harkess: Well, I hope that you found that episode with Jordan as educational, as inspirational and just really really practical in terms of managing conflict challenges that do come up in relationship. You know, things are not always smooth sailing. We don’t always speak the same language, but hopefully with the tips and tricks shared here today things will feel a little bit clearer. So of course, head to the.love.therapist on Instagram to keep up to date with what Jordans up to there and to jordanandrea.com to check out what’s going on with all of the wonderful services she’s offering as The Love Therapist. I hope that you stay well and I look forward to dropping into your earbuds in a fortnight. Alright. Bye for now.

Outro: Thanks for joining us this week on the Wisdom for Wellbeing Podcast. Please visit drkaitlin.com to connect, find show notes, other episodes and to subscribe. While you’re at it, if you find value in the show, we’d appreciate a rating or perhaps simply tell a friend about the show, Wisdom for Wellbeing is not a substitute for professional individualized mental health treatment. If you are in crisis, please contact 000, your local emergency number if you are outside of Australia or attend your local hospital ED.