15: Courageous Love

This conversation between James Christensen and Catherine Roebuck was recorded on July 22, 2025.

Full Transcript:

Catherine: The thing I was thinking about is that mature love is courageous love. That's the only kind of love there is that's mature. You can do infatuation and stuff without being courageous, or you could do a validation exchange, but if you're going to love like a grownup, you have to have courage.

James: I always thought of courage as being afraid and doing it anyway. Is that how you think of it too, or is there more to it?

Catherine: I do think that's it. The expectation of absolute safety is a childlike expectation of love. If you are parented really well as a kid, maybe you have that, and that could be a nice way to start your life. Most of us don't have that. And so then it's figuring out how you step into love when you haven't ever experienced it as safe, because the safety is going to come after the growth and the bravery; it won't be there before. The only way kids get that is if they had brave parents who had done a lot of growing.

James: The building of the solid self has to come before we experience any safety in relationships. We try to put the cart before the horse when we attempt to create safety between two immature people. It's not that they're unsafe, it's a felt sense of safety. So that I don't feel safe, which is much more a product of me than it is of you.

Catherine: So it's the solid self, I think, which is this confidence of "I can take care of myself."

James: Which is why I'm safe. And ultimately, as an adult, it's always going to be why I'm safe. As an adult, I will never acquire someone who will take care of me as a child for more than a few months.

Catherine: And even if you did, you could lose them.

James: You could lose them, and you will lose them. It just doesn't seem to be a stable model for a relationship.

Catherine: No, I agree with that. One of the things Thatn talks about is that you can't love your spouse well until you're at a point where you could handle burying them, like losing them to death. And I think that's what he is talking about. Even if someone is really, really good to you and you couldn't imagine being loved better, you're going to have this kind of childlike grip on the relationship itself unless you have that confidence and solidity in yourself of, "I can take care of me too," because there are no guarantees.

James: Love always demands courage because love is always banned by time. It’s never infinite, and there's always a chance that the other person dies first. If nothing else goes wrong, there's always that chance. And so there is always the risk of losing. If I'm operating off of this base of insecurity and fears of abandonment, then it will just never go away.

Catherine: So there's always that fear of, "Who's going to take care of me if this person leaves or dies?" And the only viable answer to that, the only thing you could rest in, is "I am."

James: It's a fundamental shift. It's so hard to actually become an adult in that way, of really trusting myself.

Catherine: One of the things that I think is hard about getting married really young is that you don't have that experience of taking care of yourself before you get into a marriage. It's hard to build a lot of confidence experientially that you can when most of your adult life you've been relying on someone else.

James: Perhaps. You're saying that maybe an experience of independent living might help establish a foundation for a good relationship.

Catherine: Yes, and there's plenty of people that can take care of themselves in a pragmatic sense.

James: That's what I was thinking. Someone who can take care of themselves, okay, they have a place to live, they have food to eat. But I'm thinking more, can you establish a thriving life for yourself? Because that's a huge difference between that and your average, "I have an apartment and I have groceries."

Catherine: But do you know how to soothe your own emotional pain without having somebody built in to go to?

James: When someone asks you how to self-soothe, I always feel like anything I say will not do justice to the truth of the answer to that question. I've always wondered why Dr. Shar was never too explicit about that. He would say, "Calm yourself down. Soothe your own pain." And he was hesitant to oversimplify that process.

Catherine: He did get a little bit more granular about it in Living at the Bottom of the Ocean, but it's still hard for me to take what he wrote there and apply it. Some of what I remember is he talks about just sitting with your feet on the floor, breathing in and out, kind of being with the intensity. For me, the best path to self-soothing is typically self-compassion, just talking to myself kindly, treating myself kindly. It's what I would do for one of my kids. If they're distressed and I can't make it better, I remember when one of my sons broke his arm at school. I picked him up, and it was a really bad break. I was driving him to the hospital, and he was in a ton of pain. Even though I was trying to drive really smoothly, every single little bump hurt. I couldn't do very much for him, but I just talked to him through the whole drive, as kindly as I could, just being present with him. Like, "I'm right here with you, and I'll do everything I can for you. And I'm sorry." And that's kind of what I do with myself too. Just, "I'm here, I love you, I'll take care of you," the things you would want to hear from a close friend or partner.

James: I just started reading Already Free by Tift again, and he starts out explaining the difference between the Western psychotherapeutic approach to distress and the Buddhist approach. The Western approach is like, "Let's make this distress go away," and the Buddhist approach is, "Let's not make it go away; let's reframe the meaning I'm giving to it." He adopts both of those, which I think is a powerful combination. But I've been experimenting with that myself, with this idea of, "I give myself permission to feel humiliated, for example, or I give myself permission to feel embarrassed on and off for the rest of my life." I yield to this distress. It's a kind of yielding. It's like I will allow myself to feel this unpleasant feeling, but in the process of allowing it, I'm reframing how I look at it.

Catherine: What you're calling yielding, I think about as dropping my argument with reality.

James: I think some people call it surrender—surrendering to reality. And that's kind of what Tift is talking about. Realistically, for most of us, we can expect to experience various kinds of distress on and off throughout the rest of our lives, especially if we want to love and be loved. He considers that to be the primary driver of distress. So if I want to love and be loved, then part of that is I give myself permission to feel the distress that goes along with it, on and off for the rest of my life.

Catherine: I think there's something freeing about that. When you accept that reality—and for most of us, if you take the stuff we hate to feel like being bored, lonely, insecure—we can look back and find it very young in our lives and realize, "I've been feeling this on and off for decades." So it seems likely I will continue to feel this on and off for decades. But there's something freeing about that, where then you can run experiments on, "Maybe if I relate to it differently or I try a different intervention on myself, then I can make it hurt less or move through it quicker." But there's less of this desperation behind it. It's like, I can run an experiment, but I'll still be okay if the data I gather is, "No, that one didn't work. Still feeling that way."

James: But I think the surrender does actually decrease the intensity of the stress because it decreases the meaning we give to it. So if I have a pain somewhere in my body and I don't know what's causing it, then that pain is more distressing than, say, a sunburn. If I was out in the sun for four hours, I got a sunburn, and now my skin hurts. That's less distressing than waking up at four o'clock in the morning and my skin hurts and I don't know why. So this idea that pain, suffering, and distress are a known part of life and are to be expected—especially if I'm committing to a life of intimacy and love—is even more to be expected. I can push others away, and I can push my partner away and thereby decrease the pain and intensity I experience, but that also decreases the intimacy and the love that I can experience.

Catherine: So you're talking about how one of the reasons that we push a partner away or build in more distance in close relationships is that getting close puts us in closer contact with our pain and suffering. If we're rejecting the idea that we're going to feel this way on and off throughout life, then we're going to be much more tempted to just separate from people.

James: If I don't give meaning to the suffering, the other part is giving meaning to it, acknowledging that this is part of having a relationship. Whereas in the Western tradition, it's more like a relationship should be pain-free. Every time you get home from work, you should be happy to see your partner, and they should be happy to see you. And all these things should just be the way it is, which of course is not realistically true. It's part of the system that we experience plenty of distress.

Catherine: So a lot of the courage involved in mature love is knowingly, on purpose, and repeatedly saying, "I'm going to get closer to that pain because that's what's going to happen if I get closer to you."

James: Absolutely. And I'm willing to tolerate this discomfort for growth and for love. I'm willing to feel this unpleasant or intense feeling. That's the other thing that Tift talks about: you can call it unpleasant, or you can just say it's intense. I was talking to Tift the other day and I was feeling this intensity in my body, but I realized this is a very intense feeling, but it's not really fundamentally unpleasant. It's just intense, like hot sauce. Hot sauce is intense, and some people really like it. I think you can learn to like the intensity of love. Being married and stepping into greater intimacy in my marriage brings with it a certain intensity, and I think you can learn to be okay with that and to take a certain amount of fulfillment from it. I mean, there is a certain overlap between intense pain and intense pleasure.

Catherine: Sure. A lot of the things that people find meaning in have some aspect of being intense in a difficult way, whether it's people who climb mountains or going and making themselves really tired and sore just for the fun of it—for the views, but also for the experience itself. There are plenty of people who would prefer to climb the mountain even if there were a rollercoaster or helicopter to ride to the top.

James: We were designed to face difficulty.

Catherine: One of the things Tift talks about, and I think he's just borrowing this from broader Buddhist thought, is that even in our entertainment, we want challenge. We don't want to watch a movie where everything goes smoothly and it's sunny and 75 every day. The movie where every single day you get home from work and your partner's happy to see you, and the kids are happy to see you, and everyone likes dinner and you go to bed on time—no one's going to the theater for that movie. It's really boring. So where do we get the idea that what we want for our own lives is that?

James: No one really wants a relaxing life.

Catherine: It doesn't look that way for the most part. The other thing that I'm really drawn to in movies and books and stories, and a lot of people are, is acts of great courage. People facing steep odds and saying, "I want to try anyway."

James: For me, and probably for others, a lot of courage in a relationship is being called to reveal more of myself. I'm instinctively very strategic about what I reveal and what I hide, and I'm very good at hiding. So courage for me in my marriage often comes down to letting myself be plainly seen. That does feel like an act of courage to me, and I'm usually pleased with myself when I do that.

Catherine: One of the things that's hard for me to reveal about myself, and for most people, is any aspect where I see a problem with what I'm doing, but I'm not yet confident I can stop or change. Where I could get a view where I'm like, "I can be so mean," but for all these reasons—I'm under a lot of pressure, I get dysregulated, you're pushing all my buttons—I'm actually not sure that I have the strength or the commitment to give that up. And if I own it, if I tell you, "I've been thinking about what I just said and just how deeply mean it is," it feels like I'm just handing ammo over. Like this is going to come back and be used to put me down and attack me. And I think there are a couple of reasons people are scared of that, including that it's hard not to do that. When somebody hands you a really good case that they know they have a problem and they tell you about it, and then you see them do it again, it's really hard not to say, "There it is, that thing," and call them on it. But that's part of the courage, I think, being willing to hand people that kind of information. If you're choosing to be in a partnership with them, to say, "I know you could use this against me, but what matters more here is that I start to own this and deal with it. I'm not going to do that if I'm denying it to you, pretending I don't see what I'm doing and just go fix it in secret or something." I think it's a necessary level of exposure, but it's very scary and difficult. Does that line up with the kinds of things that you have a hard time revealing about yourself?

James: Yeah, that's exactly it. That happened on a very small scale just now. Molly was asking about the upper cabin, and I said the internet's slow because she has some clients this week. I said, "The internet's slow, you might want to make a test run before you see your client." She said, "Well, can't you test it?" And I said, "Well, I just did," but there was an edge in my voice. I was getting irritated because I told her the internet's slow, and then she asked if I can test it, but I knew it was slow because I had tested it. She had no ill intent in asking that. It is so interesting because I responded to her in this sharp way as if she had. There's just no reason for me to respond in a sharp way other than she was not clearly perceiving what was in my mind. So I snapped at her and then I immediately caught myself and said, "Oh, I'm sorry for snapping at you. There's just no reason." And even if she had some kind of ill intent, there's still no reason for me to snap at her. I just saw in this minute how easy it is for me to hold her to a much higher standard than I hold myself to. But that comes into courage, because I did reveal myself in that minute. I have a default setting, which is to frame her as having done something wrong, and I'm quite good at it. By snapping at her, I was implying that she had asked something inappropriate or she'd ignored what I'd said. But by revealing myself, I'm trying to step out of that and saying, "I know that there was no reason for me to snap at you."

Catherine: And that's making me think another aspect of courage is to not push your partner's buttons even when you know how. It's easy to want to do that, partly because if you can get them to act out, then it takes the pressure off you to live up to your own values or commitments. It's like, "What am I supposed to do? This person's so mean to me," or "they're lazy," or whatever the critique is, but it gets you off the hook.

James: It does. It reminds me of if I can position you as constantly responding to me. If I am the one making the moves and you are constantly on edge thinking, "Oh, what's James going to do next?" and if you're constantly in response, then it gives me a sense of power and control. It's a way of controlling a person. And like you say, I do know all of my wife's triggers and buttons, and I can push them and keep her in that responsive space if I want to. It takes a lot of effort, but people do it all the time.

Catherine: The larger the gap between where you are and where you want to be in your relationship, the more courage is required. So if you come from a home where people were often argumentative or cold or just generally not very kind to each other, and you're trying to give yourself and your kids a home where people are really patient and really warm, it takes a ton of courage to do that. I think both because you'd have to see the reality of what you didn't get as a kid, and then you'd have to try to show up and love in a way that you haven't yet been loved.

James: I think one of the hardest things is what you're talking about: imagining what "better" looks like. It's so hard. I think you almost have to see it firsthand to a certain extent, at least to get a taste of it. Imagining what deeper caring and deeper commitment and more courage looks like... it's really easy to live many years on this planet without experiencing consistent care and consistent courage.

Catherine: I agree that having examples is extremely helpful. I do think most of us have examples available, even if it's just through books and movies.

James: What are your favorites? Because I was just thinking, I guess I was so cynical about this. I do think families like this exist, I think they're pretty rare, but do you have examples that come to mind from books or movies?

Catherine: A lot of people love Little Women for the warmth in that family. I think a lot of fiction, actually, is where I've found it.

James: I think Ted Lasso shows a little bit. Ted Lasso does a great job, actually, of people caring about each other.

Catherine: That is one of the better examples on TV right now.

James: And it's so intriguing. I mean, that show is still like the number three show on Apple TV+. But it's so rare to see a depiction of people really caring about each other.

Catherine: But it's also the progression, because you see them grow into that. You see them start out pretty suspicious of each other, doing some twisty things to each other, and then start to face their impact, face themselves, figure out what their values are, and figure out what they need to do to live up to it.

James: There are these rules about improv, which you and I do together sometimes. And one of the rules of improv is you always know what the other person is talking about. So if someone implies that you have a skill, then you have the skill. If somebody says, "Doctor, doctor, you have to operate right now," and if I say that to you in an improv scene, then you know how to operate. You don't say, "I don't know how to operate," because the scene falls apart. What it is, is it's a way of establishing a world that makes sense. If I talk to you as if you know how to do something, then the world I'm creating with you is that you know how to do it, and it's this cohesive world. The other thing is that in improv, you always care about the person you're with. The relationship is always important. It's so interesting because the rules of building an improv scene are the same as the rules of building a family. You look for the best in people, you expect the best in people, and you hope to bring out the best in another person. So all of my actions have to be weighed against, "Is this going to bring out the best in my partner or the worst in my partner?" And that doesn't mean... sometimes bringing out the best in my partner could initially cause an offensive response, but in the long run, are my actions likely to encourage the best of my partner to stand up?

Catherine: Right, so it's about what you're inviting.

James: Yes, "inviting." That's the word you used when we talked about this the other day. What are you inviting? Which is a good word for it.

Catherine: I like to think about it that way because people always get a choice. But based on how you tell your wife you already checked the internet speed, there's a way you could say exactly the same thing that would be inviting her into a calm and warm connection.

James: I could have done so much better. It’s so interesting that it just snapped like that.

Catherine: Well, you're saying there's no reason, but I know the reason. It's just that that's the automatic pathway. That's the default. Based on where you come from, that is the default. And so there's your reason. It's not a good one, but it's a real one.

James: Sometimes I say we're just neural networks; we don't get to choose our training data.

Catherine: I used to think that you could really entirely get rid of those default pathways, and I'm not sure of that anymore. Now it seems more to me like you can deliberately strengthen a different pathway, and you could strengthen it so much, you could follow it enough times that that is actually the new default. But if you get super stressed or sick or something, and you're feeling more like you did... I notice it when I start to feel a way that I felt at an earlier point in life when I wasn't doing as well, my brain will reach for the pathways that I had at that point. It's easy to regress into that, and you have to on purpose pull yourself back up to, "I've got different coping and response options now." But I also think for me, at least, a big part of what makes it difficult is actually just grieving the childhood that I wanted and didn't have. There are good things about my childhood, but that feeling of being safely loved as a kid, feeling held in someone's warm affection as a baseline, as a daily experience... like most people, I think, I didn't have that. And I'm not going to have it now. There's something to grieve about the time in my life where I could have a legitimate position of receiving more than I give and just leaning on another person's love and not having to be so brave myself. That part is over. It won't ever happen again. There isn't a way to have it now. You get it or you don't get it, and that's just the luck of the draw. So that's your starting point: you have to find a way to make peace with that.

James: The beautiful thing here about this is that you and I are both parents, and both of us care a lot about loving our children really well. And that skill you're talking about, of caring for yourself, is the exact same as caring for your children. There's no difference. To the extent that we struggle to care really well for ourselves, we also struggle to care really well for our children. This is something that has just become so blatantly obvious to me over the past year. I was quite unaware of the extent to which I was not deeply concerned for my children's welfare. I was okay with my children not thriving. I was kind of like, "Eh, it's kind of on them," as opposed to, "I care deeply." How much work am I willing to put in to help this person thrive? And I just think that applies equally to how much work am I willing to put in to help me thrive. I think it's the same thing.

Catherine: And there's another aspect of growing as a parent, which is that I have a clearer view of the problems with how I used to do things. I think that's part of what you're describing. So I'll look back with a lot of sadness and regret. It's starting to be a conversation with my kids a little bit too, where one of my sons came to me with a memory from almost six years ago that he said was really bothering him. And it's where I was being overly harsh on him as a parent, and I really was. And just having to face that and look at it... I have the context of what I was navigating at the time, the kinds of stress I was under. I can have compassion for myself, but I can also look at it and see that was not an okay way for me to handle that at all. This thing of being a consistently warm, safe, nurturing parent—that's an example of me not living up to that at all. And it's still bothering him years later. My hope is that it won't still be bothering him in 20 years, and that it'll help that I'm willing to look at it and talk about it.

James: What you did in that conversation is you... because his brain would gravitate towards trying to find an explanation that doesn't take away your innocence. That's the default. But if you talk to him and you're like, "Oh no, I was definitely not innocent in that," and you say, "You need to understand that I should have treated you much better than that," you take on that responsibility. And now his brain settles into reality, which is, "Okay, I was innocent. I was a child. My mother was not innocent; she was an adult." And that is a reality that is rare and precious because as a general rule, parents tend to cling to innocence, which is a very rare thing to have as a parent.

Catherine: It was exactly that that seemed to make a difference for him. There's this moment where I told him, "You really did nothing wrong there. There were some things you were doing that were difficult for me, but you were a kid."

James: Exactly. Things that you were doing that were very normal for a child to do.

Catherine: Completely normal, age-appropriate kid things. And this is entirely on me that I reacted so badly. I had some big stressors in my life at that time, but this is all on me. And it was like his whole posture changed; he just relaxed.

James: I can almost imagine the tumblers in his brain just going click, click, click and just being like, "Ah."

Catherine: Because the thing keeping him ruminating on this, I think, is that he's trying to figure out, "There's something wrong with me because I don't understand why my mom, who's usually not a harsh person, would be so harsh to me. And I just can't figure out what the big problem was with what I was doing."

James: He has to find a way where it's his fault. He's trying to find this causal relationship where, "I did something that led my mom to become a monster."

Catherine: And it's like, no, not at all. And I also told him there's nothing a kid could do that would make it okay for a parent to yell at them that way. There's just nothing. But he really relaxed. And I really believe in children's innocence.

James: So that's a great example of creating love through courage because it was a courageous act for you to reveal yourself to him. Lacking courage, you would've hidden.

Catherine: I had a heads-up because he first went to his dad, so I heard secondhand, "Heads up, this is bothering our son." And it was hard. I immediately knew what memory he was talking about because it's one that's bothered me too. And then I had to really push myself on, "How am I going to talk to him about this in a way that is going to go far enough on taking this off of his plate and putting it onto mine, which is where it belongs?" Because this is totally my stuff, my issue. But it took some serious self-soothing beforehand because this is the first time I've had that kind of conversation with a kid. And it also had me facing, "Okay, all the other things that I remember as a parent that I have a problem with. Am I going to have to do this with all of them?" I'm willing, but it's hard. It really is. It's that whole thing we were talking about, about owning up to it when you see a problem with what you did.

James: And it requires a very strong sense of self, because my pseudo-self, my false sense of self, is built on this idea of my innocence. So if I have to talk to my children about how I'm not innocent—of all the people in the world, the ones most likely to see me as innocent are my own children. And so if I take that away, if I can't really love myself, then that's a brutal place to be. If I can't see myself as not innocent and still hold compassion for myself, then I won't do it.

Catherine: So this is why so many people will hold onto the idea that their parents did their best. And there's a way, I don't even think that's false, but it's also not helpful.

James: It's not the point.

Catherine: It doesn't... it's not the point. Because it's in this direction... like even this experience, I really was under a ton of stress when I had that interaction with my son. But what was I doing my best at in that moment? I wasn't doing my best at being kind and gentle to him.

James: That is so annoying, how people use the whole, "I did my best." I can't even articulate why it bothers me so much, but it's the wrong question and the wrong answer to the wrong question.

Catherine: I think it's the wrong question. It's not about the parent.

James: It's about what was my impact on this person? What was I inviting in my child in that moment? And saying, "Well, that was my best," is just such a cop-out.

Catherine: It's a smoke screen. It says, "Don't look too closely at what happened here."

James: And it says, "There is no world where I could have loved you more than I loved you," and it's so false.

Catherine: In this interaction, I just had different priorities than my kid feeling good. My priorities in that moment were more about preserving my job. An understandable priority, but...

James: But it's beyond that you had different priorities. There is a world where you could have fought for your priority in a less harsh way.

Catherine: There's certainly a way to do it. I could have somehow summoned the bandwidth at that time. Obviously, there are people who could handle that better, including me now.

James: There's something in this "I did my best" that's like, "Well, I'm not going to try." And people who say that are almost never doing their best in the moment. This idea, "I did my best in the past," it kind of implies I'm also doing my best now.

Catherine: When what you're doing now is saying, "Don't look too closely at that. I'm not going to take much responsibility." This is really about you assuring me that I'm good enough. It's so not about you. So I think you're onto something there, that that's probably the problem with it. Somebody who's saying that or is putting pressure on you to say that in real time is saying, "Look, the best I'm going to offer you is to dodge this and not take any real accountability or do anything meaningful now to help you with it."

James: When you have a child, they should give you a little card at the hospital that says, "This is your innocent card," and then they should just tear it up in front of you. Congratulations, you're a parent. You will never be innocent again. Because it's so true. Within the first few weeks of having a baby, you get frustrated with that baby.

Catherine: You're sleep-deprived and you don't know what you're doing.

James: And so you are no longer innocent.

Catherine: And it's a literal newborn baby. It couldn't be any more innocent. And when you're getting frustrated, you're acting like it could do better, but it couldn't.

James: Is this the best you can do?

Catherine: So, love at its best grows you up, and parenting is one of the types of love that can grow you up as well.

James: Absolutely.

Catherine: I had kids young and I remember distinctly holding one of my babies and having the thought, "I can't be a baby anymore."

James: So true. The real baby demands something of you.

Catherine: And just this sort of overwhelming disappointment. I'm going to have to grow up. I'm going to have to figure out how to take care of myself, which I really wasn't anywhere near good at. And I knew that, but the differential between my capacity and this infant's capacity was so stark that I couldn't dodge it. I had to be like, "I've got to deal with myself." It still takes a lot of time and mistakes, but yeah.

James: So you put most of this under the umbrella of courage. I've been thinking about the overlap between courage and discipline, where discipline would be doing things that I don't want to do and courage is doing something I'm afraid of. But it seems like your definition of courage is maybe a little bit broader than that.

Catherine: Well, I think another aspect of courage is just being willing to own your agency, willing to choose, and to choose without guarantees. You never actually know for certain if this is the best option.

James: Which once again, you have to give up your innocence, because if I make a choice and acknowledge a choice, I'm now responsible for the choice. And so what I would rather do is have someone else to blame for my choice, which is, once again, I'm trying to be innocent. I'm trying to avoid the situation of, "Oh, I made a mistake." As opposed to what's real, which is we all make mistakes all the time. But it's hard to accept the fact that every time I make a choice, I might be making a mistake.

Catherine: Or that later on, you may look back and see that there was a different, better way to do it. But you couldn't see it or you couldn't do it at the time, or you didn't. Maybe you could have, but you didn't. So I do think that's a little different from the idea of being afraid and doing it. I mean, I do think we're afraid of the responsibility of owning our choices, but it's not like if you're standing at a fork in the road that you should just always pick whichever option is scarier to you.

James: No, I don't agree with that. It's that fear is such a powerful motivator that usually if I'm facing a choice where one is scarier, unless I really sit down and contemplate, my initial gut choice is just going to be to run away from what's scary. Because fear is so powerful, often by running to fear, I'm also going towards growth. But sometimes when I'm afraid of a thing, that is also not wise.

Catherine: Fighting bears.

James: Yes. But in those cases, it's usually quite clear that it's also not wise. You could be afraid of taking some financial risk, which is also not wise. And so that fear might be serving your purpose. But in relationships, specifically in this idea of revealing yourself, "Okay, I'm afraid of revealing myself in some way. I'm afraid of opening myself up. I'm afraid of being authentic." I would say in that case, it's almost always wise to go into the fear. I mean, usually you have to be careful about how much I reveal myself, say to strangers or to people who are untrustworthy. But for someone like me, my tendency is to withhold a lot. And so, for me, it's usually a pretty good bet to go into the fear.

Catherine: So my view is that overall in a marriage—and this is not just in a marriage, this is in adult life—you're not likely to get better love from another person than you can give yourself.

James: Why? I agree with you.

Catherine: I wondered if it's partly about just having the capacity to hold that. If you think about your ability to love yourself and other people as mostly the same thing—there may be some differences, but it seems very tightly linked—and if there's nowhere inside of you that can embody that love, that can be the source of it, where is it going to go if somebody tries to hand it to you? There's no container for it. So I don't think it's that no one could offer it to you; I think it's that even if they try...

James: You would push it away.

Catherine: Or it'll go right through you. And that long-term is never sustainable. I think this is why we end up with people who are at a similar level of differentiation or emotional maturity and capacity.

James: I've always thought the largest driver of that is just that we get pretty turned off by people who are a lot less mature. So I think if I were out dating, I would get pretty turned off by someone who's a lot less mature than me, and vice versa. So I think that's why we end up with people at a certain level. Does that make sense?

Catherine: Maybe. In a long-term relationship, lots of people are still turned off by their partner, even though they're still at a similar level of immaturity.

James: I just think that if I were out dating and I met some woman who was significantly more mature than me, I don't think that it's possible for her to really be attracted to me. That's kind of a theory. There was a woman that I knew in my late teens, and we liked each other. Then we parted ways and met again several years later. She had matured considerably, and I had not. We had both really liked each other when we were like 19, and we came back and we were like 21, 22, and I was almost 23. I was interested in pursuing her and courting her. I kept in touch over the years and said, "I've liked you for a long time, I'd like to get to know you better." And she said, "You know, many years ago, I would've also liked that, but I'm not interested anymore." And I really think that was a case of her... I think she went through some serious growth during those years, and I think I didn't. And I think what she'd seen in me years before was just no longer appealing to her.

Catherine: And even the way she told you that was pretty mature.

James: Oh, she was. And I think she was more mature. I think for some reason I just stagnated during those years and she grew at a much faster clip.

Catherine: So what about the mechanism of... you can partner with someone at the same level, but what's keeping you at the same level when you're with someone for many years?

James: That's a question I think about all the time. I think if I'm in a marriage and there's a lot of contact in that marriage—we're living together and we're talking to each other every day—I think that growth is quite contagious. I think it's really hard to stay, quite difficult to be a lot less mature than your partner is. I see them as connected by a rubber band, and when one person moves ahead, that rubber band is pulling them back, but it's also pulling the other person forward. There's this tension. Like if I'm seeing my wife every day and if I'm treating her really, really well, it gets harder and harder for her to treat me poorly. It really does. People argue about that, but I'm pretty convinced it's true.

Catherine: I agree that it's true, and I think it's one of the primary mechanisms where therapy or coaching helps people get better and grow, is that you work with somebody who consistently treats you well. If they're a good therapist or coach, they're going to consistently treat you well.

James: And it's not just treating you well, but it's treating you well while stepping into conflict and treating you well in conflict. Because if we're bound together by this rubber band, the only way forward is conflict. But if I step into conflict unkindly, that's obviously moving backwards. So it's stepping into conflict with kindness and caring, which I think is the core of really good therapy.

Catherine: I agree. And also just the core of good relationships. There's a business book, Radical Candor, that talks about if you're going to be an effective leader, you have to be able to care personally and challenge directly at the same time. It talks about if you're only going to care personally, but you are not willing to challenge directly, you end up in the quadrant of "ruinous empathy," which I think is an excellent term.

James: Just validating. "I'm going to validate you, but you have a large spaghetti stain on your shirt, and I'm not going to tell you about it. I'm just going to let you go do that interview on TV with a spaghetti stain on your shirt because I'm too afraid to confront you."

Catherine: Or I can see something about you that's really costing you in your personal or professional life, and I could say something about it, but I'm not going to because you'll be unhappy with me.

James: And I can't handle that pressure.

Catherine: So I think about that when I'm thinking about courageous love. It's this aspect of, "I'm going to be real with you, but I'm not going to let myself just vent at you." Or, to quote a Taylor Swift lyric, be "casually cruel in the name of being honest."

James: Oh, wow. That's a beautiful lyric. That's what people do all the time. "Well, I'm just being honest." No, you're being honest, but you're not just being honest. You're being honest and stabbing your partner with a paring knife. You're being honest and cruel.

Catherine: And that's going to always cost a relationship and also make it much more difficult for your partner to actually deal with what you're pointing out. It's aversive to get close to or to look at that because there's this wound associated with it of, "My partner glares daggers at me whenever they talk to me about this." So yeah, that's the thing that we all reach for, and it's really hard to do, but it's also what a good coach or therapist is going to do. It's, "I'm going to be honest with you, and I'm going to stay in close contact and care about you while I do it."

James: And it comes back to the word you said at the beginning, which is, "I'm going to invite the best from you." I'm inviting your best to stand up, which is the most important thing. It comes down to so much more than what I say. Words matter, but they never matter as much as, "What am I inviting from you?"

Catherine: And so I think about, if I want someone to take a closer look at something, but when I talk to them about it, I am looking down on them or I'm looking away from them... I'm talking on both a metaphorical level but also on a literal level of, am I breaking eye contact when I try to confront you? Can I handle telling you about what I see and still letting you see me, holding close contact at the same time? And if I can't do that, it's a lot to ask for you to do that, for you to get closer and look at this when you can feel me pulling away. I don't think we solve any problems that way.

James: What you just said about holding eye contact while confronting someone is so powerful because that comes back to this idea of intensity. That's an intense thing to do. And can I deal with that intensity, or do I have to shy away from it?

Catherine: I think it holds you more accountable for what you're thinking and feeling while you talk to them, because one of the reasons people look away is it's much harder to hide your contempt if you're looking right at somebody.

James: Steve Gilligan told me something that just ran straight into my heart. He said, "James, every time you look away, you abandon the little one inside of you." Which just really strikes me because I look away all the time, constantly. It feels like such a natural thing to do, but it must be true on some level, this idea that I can't handle this intensity. And what he's saying is that there's this very vulnerable part inside you that if you can't handle the intensity, then no one will be here for that little part inside you, the young part that's afraid of being abandoned.

Catherine: That self-soothing is exactly not abandoning the little one, tolerating that intensity, because the little one never gets out of it. It's only the grown, agentic person who gets out of it, who gets to choose. "I could look away, I could numb out, I could get high or drunk, I could go get some cheap validation from somebody." I could do something other than look right at this. The courage to confront yourself is not limited to just the revealing yourself part. It's also letting yourself see yourself as you talk to somebody. And those questions we've talked about, like the internal self-confrontation of, "Do I mean well? What impact am I going to have?" Or I think about it as, "Am I inviting this person to a fight?"

James: "Am I inviting you to fight? Am I inviting you to love?"

Catherine: If I'm inviting you to fight me, it's just a variation on "Do I mean well?" But it's really looking at, do I want to solve a problem here, or do I want to prove we're both bad, and maybe you're a little worse?

James: Do I want to invite loving behavior from you or am I inviting defensive behavior from you? It goes back to the idea of pushing buttons. It's so easy to make someone look bad. I talk to couples sometimes about how in a relationship that turns into a power struggle, which most do, my brain will naturally seek ways of pushing your buttons. I'll look for the chinks in your armor. And those are often related to how your parents treated you. So I end up acting like my in-laws. People talk about, "Oh, you marry your parents," and I think there's some truth to that, but I think there's an even greater truth that your partner, in a contentious marriage, is likely to become more and more like your parents. Because that's your weakness. That's the kind of behavior that is most likely to get a reaction from you—however your parents manipulated you.

Catherine: So they don't even have to know your parents.

James: No. You don't even have to know. Your parents could be dead, and when you get married, your partner will still gradually, as water runs downhill, fall into patterns of behavior that mimic how your parents tried to manipulate you when you were young because you're susceptible to that.

Catherine: And that's a tough thing to look at if you don't like your in-laws, which most people don't like that much.

James: My wife used to say, "You're just like my mom." And I'd be like, "No," but she was right. She was right on a very interesting level. There was one particular pattern of behavior that I gradually grew into in the first 10 years of our marriage that really was an echo of how her mom treated her. And it was interesting because I had never seen her mom treat her that way. But I just naturally chanced upon this behavioral pattern and it had this massive impact on her, and my brain notches that down as, "Oh, if I really want to get my wife, this is how I do it." And it turns out to be just a thing her mom used to do.

Catherine: So what makes this all worth doing? It sounds hard.

James: It is hard. To love and be loved and to be okay.

Catherine: I think most of us carry some deep insecurity about, "Could anyone really know me and love me?"

James: Oh, definitely. That's why we hide.

Catherine: And we're concerned that we couldn't know and love ourselves either, so we look away there too. And so that's where, whether you're confronting yourself or another person, the only helpful way to do it is with love. It's gotta be, "I can see this in you and I can love you." Whether you're talking to yourself or your partner or a client, it's gotta be like, "I can see you for who you are and still see you as lovable, miraculous... this galaxy of qualities and not pin you down to who you are at the worst thing you ever did."

James: Or not judge you on how I react to you. Who you are is very separate from what distress arises in my body when I interact with you. That's a very poor reflection of who you are as a person, but that's how we judge most people. I feel distress interacting with most people. I do not handle intense one-on-one interactions very well. It's hard for me and I shy away from them. So it's pretty easy for me to kind of blame that on everyone else in the world, but it doesn't make a lot of sense to do that.

Catherine: Interesting career you chose.

James: It is an interesting career. Maybe there's some meaning to that. No, but I do struggle with individual therapy for that reason. The amount of contact required to do good individual therapy is hard for me. There's a drama in couples therapy that kind of gets me out of it. There's also something in couples therapy where if I can confront one partner, then I get validated by the other partner. There's a natural support system there. Whereas if it's just two people, if I'm just confronting one person in the room... that really is hard for me. I've been a couples-only therapist for a long time now, and I'm considering actually opening back up to individuals as a way for me to grow.

Catherine: I also think you've grown a lot in whatever amount of time since you decided to be couples-only. So it's like you have more capacity to do it now and to do it well. But I think we are not any more able to know and love ourselves than to know and love another person. And getting really close to anyone just gets you a clearer view of that. It's one of the things that makes it worth doing, I think. Worth pushing yourself on getting close to people, even though it's hard, and being courageous in your love. It gives you a shot at really knowing and loving yourself before you die, which, if there's anything worth doing in life, that seems pretty high on the list to me: to make peace with myself.

James: I was thinking this morning about what it means to thrive as a person. I think the ability to know and love yourself, which is the same as knowing and loving other people... it's easier to measure to what extent you can know and love another person. That is so core to... you could even say what is an indication of brain health. We think about, "I have a healthy heart," and there are ways of measuring that. But, "I have a healthy brain"? How do you measure that? Traditional people say intelligence, and I'm like, no, it's not intelligence, because you can be wildly intelligent and have a miserable life. So I think about courage, which is kind of what we're talking about today, and connection or contact—the ability to know and love another person. My ability to really be with you and to be fully present and to offer something solid to you and to appreciate what you offer to me and to appreciate you as a person, to truly see someone... I think that's possibly the best single indicator of brain health. How well is my brain functioning? How well can I connect with other people?

Catherine: If the function of a human brain is meaningful contact, I agree. And intelligence just isn't enough because, like you said, plenty of people are very smart and very unhappy.

James: And I think this becomes even more so as computers get crazy smart. Computers today are ten times smarter, as in more capable of doing human tasks, than they were two years ago.

Catherine: We're going to be able to outsource more and more of those.

James: A computer just got a gold medal at the Math Olympiad. So this whole idea that the measure of human brain health is intelligence, I think is becoming less and less relevant. What matters more is to what extent I can really make contact with another human being and just really appreciate and know you as a person and offer myself to you as a person. That's something computers are never going to be able to do.

Catherine: I think that's the good stuff in life. We've been talking about a lot of really hard stuff, and the "why do it?"... I actually think that is the path to the good stuff. You're going to have to do a lot of the hard stuff to get to where you could... I mean, one of the happiest days of my life was when we spent the day with your friends in Provence. We were just out on their patio and enjoyed this home-cooked, five-course meal over three hours, listening to the birds, watching the bees buzz around the flowers. Just this idyllic setting. And the thing that was so remarkable to me about that was the comfort and contact, even though there was a language barrier because they spoke very, very little English and I speak functionally no French. You did some translating, but there was this deep peace for all four of us throughout that day. And to think, "That's the good stuff." Your happiness and fulfillment as a human comes from that kind of peaceful, close contact with other people, with nature, with the pleasures of the senses—the taste of the food and the smell of the fresh air and the sound of the birds. But most of us are too caught up in our own anxieties and our inner world of misery to even be present with that. It can be right there, and we'll be checking our phone.

James: So true.

Catherine: Happiness is available, but we can't handle the intensity of it. We have to do all of these things to build neural pathways so that we can be at peace with intensity.

James: That's really profound. "Happiness is available, but we can't handle the intensity of it."

Catherine: I remember when I first started to make friends, one of the problems I would have was I would end up with a headache from smiling too much.

James: Because you didn't have enough practice. Your smiling muscles were too weak.

Catherine: And this was as a young adult. I would get in situations where I was just smiling a lot for hours because I was really enjoying people, and then I'd get this crazy headache from muscle cramps. But the intensity of happiness... we really, for the most part, can't handle it.

James: That's so true. Because intensity is intensity.

Catherine: And especially if you grew up in a place where intensity was always negative.

James: Sometimes I talk to parents about how your children need to experience intense emotions with you on a daily basis. And if you do not provide them intense positive connection, they will seek intense negative connection if that's all that's available. Maybe it's not just children. Maybe we all need to feel that intensity. Maybe if the only way I can have an intense emotional connection with you is by fighting with you, then I'll fight.

Catherine: I see that all the time in couples. And I think that's absolutely true. If I'm looking for evidence that I'm really important to you and I can't seem to get you to engage on a positive level, if flirtation is not working, then maybe I'll start a fight. And then I'll get that little hit of, "I knew that I mattered to you. Look, you can't even focus on your work or you can't sleep. I knew I mattered." It sounds dark, but it's the same mechanism as a kid that tries to show Mom their drawing and Mom isn't really interested, and they try to ask Mom why beetles are shiny and Mom doesn't really engage, and so then they start a fight with their brother and suddenly they've got Mom's attention. Or they start a fight with Mom. I do think we need contact. We need to feel people get close and care.

James: Some of my favorite games were bluffing games where it's intense. "Do they have the card?" I used to play those games all the time with my kids because it was so delicious for us to be sitting there and there's this intensity of emotion. And it felt so important. It was important to me. I always say, "Oh, your kids need this," but I needed that. I need to know that there is someone in my life that I can be really authentic with, where I can let my emotions show and show that I'm worried or I'm scared or that I'm enjoying this.

Catherine: I think what you just said applies to when you were saying, "Maybe we all need this." Parents need intense interactions with their kids too. And if the parent doesn't know how to do that in a positive way, like playing games, then the parent is going to pick fights with their kids too. I see parents do that all the time. Playing with your kids is really important, but a lot of us have a hard time playing. Many adults struggle with play at all. There was one game I got into with my kids that I hated at first because I would be so stressed and tense. It was on a timer, and I had this breakthrough moment where I realized, "I don't have to try so hard. I'm trying to do my best at this game, pushing myself to do it as fast as possible." It was a collaborative game. And I thought, "Let's see what happens if I just slow down to the point that it's actually enjoyable for me." The only thing that happened was I started having fun. But it's me learning to handle the intensity of that game, and also learning to handle the intensity of showing up in a real way and knowing my actual limits. It was this trade between being impressive and being present that I had to make.

James: The "impressive" thing is something that I didn't know about myself that I've learned recently, where some of my most treasured childhood memories were around me being impressive. And how deeply ingrained it was in me that my value came from being impressive. I had this addiction to this as an adult where the only way I thought I would ever matter to people was because I was impressive in some way, as opposed to, "Do I matter because I'm a human being in the way that all people matter?" And that's been a difficult change for me to make. I find my brain reverting to that still, sometimes trying to impress people.

Catherine: I think a lot of people struggle with that, especially people that are talented or smart or get that kind of feedback from a young age about their performance or their potential standing out. But it's one of the reasons that I think intelligence doesn't make you happy in any automatic way because it can make it much easier for you to be locked in on, "My value is being impressive. My value is being smart." I think most people with cats or dogs, they love their particular cat or dog, and most of those cats and dogs are not impressive, and not productive.

James: That's a really interesting metaphor for choosing a person, actually.

Catherine: You love your cats because you've chosen them. They're just normal cats for the most part. No one's going to write a book about these cats, but they're special to us. And that's how I feel about mine too. And it's like, that's what people are like too, but we lose sight of it. We're actually just creatures. And like creatures, we get fulfillment from the simple daily stuff of eating a meal and stretching or laying in the sun. And also like creatures, we love each other because we love each other, not because we're impressive. It's just a choice, mostly, I think.

James: Should we wrap it up there?

Catherine: I think we've got a dinner to go enjoy.

James: Thank you, Catherine.

Catherine: Thank you.