Changing your Psychological Love Light

[00:03] Intro: Welcome to the Heart Soul Wisdom Podcast, a journey of self discovery and transformation. Moira Sutton and her amazing guests share real life stories, tools, and strategies to inspire and empower you to to create and live your best life. Come along on the journey and finally blast through any fears, obstacles, and challenges that have held you back in the past so you can live your life with the joy, passion, and happiness that you desire. Now, here's your host. Create the life you love. Empowerment life coach Moira Sutton.

[00:58] Moira: Welcome to season three, episode 64, changing Your Psychological Love Life with our special guest, Dr. Thomas Jordan. Dr. Jordan is a practicing psychologist and psychoanalyst in New York City for over 30 years. His work is focused on helping people learn a clinically proven way of dramatically changing their love lives. In addition to a psychotherapy practice, he has been researching the unhealthy love life in people who experience repetitive love life difficulties. His mission is to help individuals become conscious of what they have learned about love relationships that is, interfering with their ability to form and or sustain a healthy love relationship, and to learn how they can change what is unhealthy. Thomas is the author of Learn to Guide to Healing Your Disappointing Love Life. So, without further ado, I would like to welcome a warm welcome to Dr. Thomas Jordan. Welcome, Thomas.

[01:56] Thomas: Thank you, Moira for inviting me. Thank you.

[02:00] Moira: I think your message is very important, and I know in my community here, the listeners more women than men, but they're both there, and this is a topic I think that's going to help a lot of people. So thank you for that. Thomas, let's start. What inspired you to write, learn to Love guide to healing your disappointing love life.

[02:20] Thomas: Two reasons. Two reasons. One very personal and the other professional. I made changes in my love life back in my 30s as a consequence of some personal work, some therapy work that I was doing on my own life. And I made some changes, and I realized that there was some issues that I became aware of in the course of making those changes that I could put into a book where people could read them, begin thinking about them, and use them to make similar changes. The idea was that you didn't have to be in therapy for five years, ten years, whatever, to actually make some very important and permanent improvements in your love life. So I went through that process myself. Basically, what I learned is that I had learned a few things in my family of origin that did not work in my love life. And as a consequence of that learning, which was unconscious to me, I wasn't aware, I didn't know what I had learned or that I even learned it. I was replicating disappointment one after another in my love life between the ages of 17 and 35. And when I was able to take a look at that, I realized that I could unlearn what I had learned, the unhealthy parts of it, and do something healthier, something better. And when I did that, not too long afterwards, I met my wife. And we've been married for 28 years. So I felt like there's something here that I have to put into a book that people can read and begin the process of working on their love lives, looking inside to make changes. I also, as a consequence of being a clinical psychologist here in New York City over the past 30 years, I've been always interested in collecting data, so to speak, from my clinical practice about what was going on in people's love lives. And I was really seeing a lot of repetition and a lot of replication of unhealthy relationship experiences that people had. And again, the difficult part is that none of that is conscious. So person can replicate over and over again unhealthy love relationships and not really be aware of why or how they're doing. So I was seeing quite a bit of that. So I wanted to get the message out in any way I could. And writing a book is one form of doing that.

[05:06] Moira: You covered a lot there, and we're going to be going into a lot of that. One of the first things you said there that I really liked was permanent. When you change a belief or a habit or an attitude, really a belief at an unconscious level, that permanency with that permanent.

[05:21] Thomas: Right? In my book, I talk about the psychological love life. I like to introduce people to the idea that changing their love life permanently is to go inside to look at what the psychology of their own love life consists of, because that's what they bring into love relationships. And if they've been taught that love relationships are unhealthy in a certain way, that's what they will blindly replicate over and over again. I'll give you a powerful example. A while ago I saw a woman, a 50 year old woman, who was complaining about her love relationship and was feeling depressed. And during an initial interview with her, I was trying to understand her history a bit. And she was telling me that she grew up in a home with an alcoholic, violent father. And she and her siblings witnessed physical abuse between father and mother. Father was an alcoholic, violent man. And then when we got to her current love life, she told me that she married and divorced two alcoholic, violent men and that her boyfriend was currently being emotionally abusive, threatening her with physical abuse as well. And I remember at that point, I asked her, very innocently and kind of naively, just the course of an interview, do you think there's a relationship between growing up in the family you grew up with in and what is going on in your love life? And this is an educated woman with, I think, insightful understandings. She looked at me with a blank stare, like, what? And I never forget that. I never forget that look. There was no link between what had happened in her past that had taught her that an eligible man is alcoholic and violent, and she was replicating that learning without awareness already twice, perhaps three times to come. So examples like that really made me aware of the fact that this learning, when it occurs unconsciously, it sits in the psychology of our love lives, and it replicates. And that's what learning does when it's not conscious. So the key is to become conscious of what we've learned and then enter a process of unlearning.

[08:10] Moira: So is that the key to disrupting the behavior and the belief and the feelings they have?

[08:14] Thomas: Yes. When you look at the learning, more specifically, it consists of beliefs, behaviors, and the feelings that become familiar. By the way, familiar is an interesting word. The root of the word is family.

[08:31] Moira: I love that I read that and I wrote that down. I love tidbits with words. It's like when somebody said that they're nowhere. I said, no, you're now here. So I love play on words. Exactly.

[08:47] Thomas: Do you know that the word alone was all one at one time?

[08:52] Moira: I do know that.

[08:53] Thomas: And now fell out alone, which is interesting. It's a very different idea. Right. Alone versus all one.

[09:00] Moira: Yes, there's a whole bunch of them, that's for sure.

[09:03] Thomas: Yeah, I know.

[09:05] Moira: What are the statistics of divorce rates? Are they raising? Are they declining? Where they affected during COVID, which we still have out there? But did you see differences in your clinical research and your practice happening?

[09:21] Thomas: Yeah, a while back, it was hovering around 50%, 40% to 50%. And when you added everything up, it came out to around 50%, and that was a standard number. Recently, it's been going down, but not for a good reason. It's been going down because people are not marrying as frequently as they were. And I think that that's a problem. The other part of it is that what was alarming to me is that second and third marriages are predictably much worse. For example, second marriages bring a divorce rate of 60%, and third marriage is up around 70 something. So these numbers tell me, as well as the avoidance of marriage, they confirm for me that people are making the same mistakes over and over again and reaching a point of resignation. And that I talk about resignation in the book, and I have a PowerPoint presentation I put together, and I talk about it there as well, trying to use imagery to help people learn some of these messages. And it can be a powerful addition to text or language. So what happens is that and I call it the disappointing love life. The disappointing love life is a condition. It's a condition where your love life is dominated by these unconscious learning patterns that if they're healthy, fine. It's not disappointing. Chances are you'll have a healthy love life because you'll tend to replicate the positive experiences. But if they're unhealthy, then a disappointing love life is likely. And the characteristics that I found in a disappointing love life, researching that phenomena over the years, is that it's repetitive. The disappointment occurs over and over again, and people aren't aware that that's happening necessarily. So it's sort of occurring and it repeats all the way to resignation. For some people, resignation can occur after one disappointment. Some people stop really looking for love after several disappointments. But when you enter that stage of resignation, it's really a tragic thing because people really lose hope that they can find love in their lives. I have a blog, Myra, a blog called Thelovelifelearningcentre.com. I put it up in 2012, and I wanted it to be like a library of love life articles online. I have over 300 articles on that blog. But people get some accurate viewpoints on issues from the clinical work I've been doing, just from the research I've been doing, so they can get some advice, some information about what to do in love life circumstances. And I wrote an article a few years ago called Living Without Love in your life. And boy oh boy, what an avalanche of commentary I got on that article. Some articles get the readership is kind of low, some moderate, but some the tsunami comes, and that one was a tsunami. So much so because I answer commentary when they come to my blog, I personally answer them. I interact sometimes with people via the messaging system there, and I learned a few things. I even rewrote the article twice because of some of the information that people gave me, because they were sharing some painful experiences of why they stopped looking for love and why it was difficult. And oftentimes people are in their forty s, fifty s, and sixty s when they reach that point of resignation. So that's a very powerful end state of the disappointing love life that I think is a big problem that needs a solution. And part of the solution was understanding that in addition to this repetition that takes place in a disappointing love life, if you look into it a little more deeply, you see that certain experiences are being replicated. And that's important because that kind of adds some flesh and bones to it. It really gives it a little bit of clarity that there are certain experiences. I listed ten of them in the book. I've added a couple since then. It's an evolving list of experiences that tend to get into our love lives and teach us things about love relationships that are unhealthy. And then they become experiences that sit in our psychological love life that provide sort of a template or a blueprint for the types of unhealthy love relationship experiences that get replicated over and over again. And as you mentioned, belief behavior and feeling. I looked into it yet in another level of how we unconsciously recreate these experiences. And that brought me to that formula belief, behavior and feeling. For example, if you've been abandoned, which is an unfortunate experience that can occur in childhood, for example, abandoned by a parent, and that experience of abandonment has gotten into your love life such that in the deepest recesses of your belief system, you kind of think, all right, you know, all men will abandon or all women abandon. And I've heard this stated outright when I go looking for it in conversation with people that have reached the point of resignation, they'll say to me, look, people are divorcing all over the place. It just doesn't last. You know, people leave relationships and I can tell the abandonment experience is at work influencing what people are believing. And then, of course, there's the behavior that oftentimes people who have been abandoned by relationship early in life will find unavailable partners, emotionally unavailable partners, over and over and over again. And it became apparent to me that somehow there's like this signaling system or something. I mean, why do people end up with that experience, end up with the same kind of individual over and over again who is incapable of having the kind of love relationship that sustains over time, that involves a commitment. So there's certain behaviors. For example, you can find people who abandon, and oftentimes that's the case, or you can abandon yourself or do both. And I've met individual that have done both. In certain relationships, they abandon the relationship and then in other relationships they find people who do the abandoning. And then, of course, there's the feeling for abandonment. The feeling is lost. So what ends up happening is that this person generating loss over and over again in their love life and it becomes a familiar feeling. Familiar in the sense that it replicates the feeling of loss. That obviously accompanied the experience of abandonment early in life. So that feeling is being replicated over and over again. So the learning is what I'm talking about here is the learning is involved on a belief, behavior and feeling level. And you can see how that pattern without consciousness will dominate a person's love life, possibly all the way to the point of resignation.

[17:19] Moira: There was a lot of information in there. So I'm going to see where I'm going to take that because there's a few areas I want to go. One is, as you said, abandonment is loss. So let's talk about loss and grief and how do you help somebody break that cycle which is tied into their belief, their behavior and the feeling they get. How do you work with that? I work with core beliefs at a subconscious level. That's my work. But how do you do that?

[17:46] Thomas: Yeah, in the book I talk about what I call the unlearning method because I believe learning, unconscious learning, is such an important part of these phenomena that we're talking about. I believe that there's a three step process, generally speaking. Step one is to become conscious of what we've learned. And basically we do that by looking into people's love lives or encouraging them to look into their own love lives and find patterns of repetition. Repetition is usually the clue that something has been learned unconsciously and it's basically repeating itself over and over again. So once you take a look and the list of unhealthy relationship experiences that I put together kind of helps as a general guide to stop the process. And then from there, people begin to look at replication, which deepens it a little bit more. If you see abandonment, for example, or abuse, neglect these unhealthy relationship experiences, showing up from time to time in your relationship. So every time you have a love relationship, then you know a pattern of repetition and replication is taking place. So I encourage people, when they reach the point of understanding this is happening and they've identified it, it's occurring, I encourage people to move to step two, which is to challenge the fact that this pattern is dominating their love lives. And I find that I've chosen the word challenge because I believe we human beings have the ability to challenge habits, to challenge learned experience, especially if we have consciousness on our sides. Consciousness is one of the wonderful assets in human life because we can identify problems, in this case psychological problems, issues where we've learned something unhealthy and we become aware that there's a healthier way that what we've learned is unhealthy. We can begin challenging, disrupting that automatic pattern and unconscious learning and the phenomena that it creates once you start disrupting it, once you start challenging it. And in my work, it consists of empowering people to understand that they can enter that process of unlearning. They can start to challenge and sort of study what's going on in my love life? What am I doing over and over again. What do I believe? How is it related to what's happened earlier in life? Once these questions begin to flow and people start answering them, some strengthening process is taking place inside where they can disrupt the habit. For example, sometimes I work with someone who becomes interested in starting up his or her love life again, for example, and what is it I have to look out for? Okay, we have to avoid controlling men. My father was controlling and possessive and I'm trying to not find that kind of man in my love life. So the person becomes aware that this is a possibility and let me try to develop a filter for this kind of thing so I can identify this kind of individual early, while I'm dating and so on. And so you see a process of successful filtering form. You go through a process with them where people talk about how they're doing, they examine or they journal. If they're doing it alone, they can journal these experiences and become aware of their own progress, filtering out people who are not ready for a relationship that possess some of these features that they know they cannot have in their love life that leads to an unhealthy love relationship. So that challenging ability is strengthened as the person studies their own love life and becomes committed to working on their love life to improve it. Step three is to begin a process of what I call correction. It's the correction of what's happened, what they've learned. And I like the word correction, and I also like the word opposite, because opposite means, for example, in this process that, for example, with abandonment. If you've had abandonment in your love life experience. To find someone who can make a commitment. To look for responsibility. To look for a commitment as people tell the stories of their lives at the beginning of a dating experience. For example. This is something that I think permits a person to begin steering their love life experience in a healthier direction to correct what's been learned that was unhealthy. So once the person gets to that level, I think there's a really good chance of finding healthier partners and becoming consciously aware of their love lives in a way that has not existed prior.

[23:05] Moira: Thank you. Regards to do you get more couples that come to you, or individuals? And my question is, let's say one person really wants to work on their relationship, they're committed and they want to get back to that love that they had when they met, which would be different in each stage of our life, but the other one doesn't want to work on the relationship. How do you help someone in that case?

[23:27] Thomas: Yeah, I used to do a lot of marital therapy at one time, my wife and I. My wife is a clinical social worker and an analyst. She does the family and couples. These days, I've moved more towards individuals, but I see a lot of people who are in relationships and they talk about what you just mentioned because they're in therapy, going through the process of change, and the partner is resistant to couples therapy and resistant to change. This is a big problem, and I try to be fair minded about it and think, okay, let's go through the steps. As one person changes in a relationship, I believe it creates change in the relationship. Now, the change might be difficult, for example, if one partner realizes my relationship is unhealthy and it needs to change. I've studied it, I've talked about it. I'm getting a sense of what the changes need to be. And now I'm entering arguments with my significant other because some of the things he or she does are unhealthy. And I know it now and I'm focused on it now. So you might witness in such a situation an increase in conflict, but it's not in my opinion, a bad conflict. It's conflict that occurs when a couple begins to look at patterns that may have been in control of their relationship, that now one person in the relationship is realizing they can no longer tolerate. And that could be the beginning of something. Now, you don't know what happens next until it happens. I mean, in some instances, the person who is resistant becomes interested because the person who's in therapy starts separating, starts distancing, starts feeling okay, nothing better is going to happen here, and I need something better. I'm not going to tolerate this anymore. This is replicating something in my history or in his history that I'm not going to permit. So as they begin to separate, I've seen instances where the partner says, I don't want to lose you. I realize how important you are. You mentioned couples work, let's try it. And I've seen that happen. Of course, I've also witnessed situations where the person who's in therapy begins to separate. It creates conflict. And then the relationship breaks up and the person that's in therapy takes a break from relationships for a while and then starts to formulate an understanding of what do I need to learn from this relationship or marriage that I can improve upon in the next relationship. That's a good thing. A little bit tragic that the partner that's resistant to change probably doesn't make a change. And if they find another relationship, they will repeat the pattern. I find that's not good, but these are the kind of situations that I've witnessed.

[26:59] Moira: Just to share with you. Thomas I'm coming up to my 31st 31 wedding anniversary with my soulmate clothes. We've been together for 33 years. One thing my sister in law said to me when we met, she talked about listening through communication. That you too will always be together because you talk even when it's difficult. And we still do that even if it's difficult.

[27:23] Thomas: Especially when it's difficult.

[27:25] Moira: Especially when it's difficult.

[27:27] Thomas: Yes, ma'am.

[27:28] Moira: And just the listening and no blaming, no all that kind of stuff. But how do you help couples develop a way to master their art of listening, which might foster curiosity and more understanding for their partner? Do you have techniques there?

[27:43] Thomas: Yeah, I happen to think that couples work is always starts with repairing communication. Communication breaks down when couples are at odds or unable to solve problems together. So communication is where it begins. And communication is a big umbrella term. Listening is essential to communication. Taking risks to talk about one's vulnerable feelings is the equally important skill. So you have listening and vulnerable communication, talking vulnerable. And I like the word vulnerable because the best talking that you can do in a couple's relationship is when you're feeling vulnerable. It's not something that's going to be done cool as a cucumber. It's going to be done with feelings of discomfort, unsure how the person you're talking to is going to hear what you're saying. So being able to take a risk to speak one's feelings when you're feeling vulnerable, especially hurt feelings, which I think is most important to talk about and oftentimes ignored. I mean, hurt feelings are the feelings that need to be resolved, and they can only be resolved if shared, and that's difficult for all of us. Human beings, when they feel vulnerable, have difficulty talking about hurt. Listening to your partner's hurt feelings and not getting defensive is a very important part of the listening experience, in my opinion. Defenses occur when we feel like we need to protect ourselves, and that's another difficulty we human beings can face. We all try to protect ourselves from hurt.

[29:51] Moira: Thomas we were talking about if two couples, two people, a couple that one wants to work in a relationship, the other one does not. What do you see in the examples there, and also with your wife who you work with, Victoria? What are the common things you see there? And do you see that if one person does the work, the other one comes along and gets more interested and sees that they want to work on the relationship?

[30:16] Thomas: Sometimes what sometimes happens is one person takes the lead, becomes aware of a relationship issue that's troubling the relationship that needs to be worked on, that's not being worked on because only one person is aware of what's going on. Even though I have to say that when one person say one person is in therapy, the other is not. And the person that's in therapy begins to make changes in his or her understanding of what's healthy in a relationship and what is not often reserved. Often that will promote communication that didn't happen before. Maybe the person that's in therapy will communicate the problem a little more clearly to the other person. And I've seen change happen when one person is in therapy and the other is not. Of course, it depends on the level of resistance that the one who is not in therapy has. Obviously, because it is possible for a person in therapy to become aware of a problem that's not being worked on. And then a series of difficult conversations start happening. They're therapeutic, they're positive. Oftentimes problems are not being talked about, but in an instance like this, they begin to be talked about. The person in therapy kind of makes it happen, communicates. The other person may or may not like that. And then you enter the possibility of the resistant partner realizing that it's important as a consequence of the conversations to consent to a couple's treatment. And that can happen too. These are all variable situations that can happen too. Unfortunately, there are situations where the person in therapy realizes nothing's going to change in the relationship because my partner is too resistant to making changes, and it's unhealthy what we're doing now, and I have to leave. And sometimes what happens, I've discovered with couples I've worked with and individuals I've worked with, on the way out the door, the other person says, wait a minute, wait a minute. I don't want to lose you. What do we have to do to keep this going? And couples therapy comes up again and then there's more agreement to begin couples therapy. Of course, there's reservations on the part of the person that didn't want to do it. But if the couple's therapy is successful, it oftentimes increases motivation even in the resistant partner. And then you got a good working situation going on in that particular couple's treatment. But I have to add that it's also possible for one person to be in therapy, realize that it's not going to work, and they leave and the other partner doesn't change, doesn't enter couples treatment, doesn't change, sees the problem as the other persons and the relationship ends. And in some instances, I think that's therapeutic. And I mean, I'm not in favor of relationships breaking up. I don't go into a couple's therapy situation or even with an individual with that in mind. But there are toxic relationships that are possible. And if that is the case, then it's therapeutic for the relationship to break up and people to go their separate ways. The person who's in therapy, who becomes aware of what patterns are not healthy and what they need to change for the next relationship has a better chance of improving their love life going forward. And the person that does not take seriously the idea of making change in their love life and just tries to keep things status quo, unfortunately, that person may replicate the very problem in the next relationship.

[34:53] Moira: I think it's also you talk about it in the book about taking full responsibility for your own life. Like, you know, you're there and everything that shows up. You're the pattern that's there, you know, I'm here. And that can be scary for people, but they only realize if you take full responsibility for your life, you're really empowering yourself absolutely in some space.

[35:16] Thomas: Yeah. And the psychological love life, that idea in and of itself can be a little daunting, a little difficult for people. Because now I'm suggesting your love life is not improved by necessarily going to better places to meet people or wearing better clothing or coming up with better lines to use when you meet somebody. I'm talking about looking inside oneself to make real changes in your love life. And that can be a little bit uncomfortable at first until people really realize that, look, if I change something in myself that changes everything.

[36:03] Moira: What is one story? That really real life story that just sticks in your mind, where you saw the greatest transformation that you saw with one of your clients? Does one jump out for you?

[36:15] Thomas: Yeah, my own love life.

[36:19] Moira: There you go.

[36:20] Thomas: I use myself as a case study in the book, chapter five. I even have a picture of. Mom and dad and myself when I was a year and a half, I agonized over getting, OK, let me see if I can get permission to use different case studies, blah, blah, blah. And then I realized, I'm not going to do that. I'm going to use my own love life experience because I made the change, so I'm going to do it. And I grew up in a family where first generation immigrants from the Azores Islands. My grandmother lost several male children, miscarriage and still birth. And my mother was the only child that lived. So my grandparents lived upstairs in the house that we owned and my mother, father and my three brothers lived downstairs. And my grandparents put a locking key on a lock and chain on my mother. She wasn't going to separate. They were going to hang on to their child. And it really created an unhappiness for my mother. She really never had a chance to have her own independent life. And I was the child out of four.  I'd be sitting at the dinner table when no one was home, listening to my mother's unhappiness and so on. She believes, by the way, that that's why I became a psychologist. My mother used to say that to me. It was kind of like a tongue in cheek kind of jokes. You did. I'm responsible for why you became a psychologist, but there is some truth in it, I'm sure. But the problem was that, you know, what I learned from my mother was that unconsciously I want to make sure that word gets put in there unconsciously learned from my mother that women were dependent, controlling and self-centered. And that, unfortunately, was what my mother struggled with in her character and her personality. And when I turned 17 and started having love relationships, I found dependent, controlling, self centered women. And here's the scary part. Even when I found someone who wasn't, I related to them as though they were. So that's how prominent, how dominant this pattern was in its control of my love life. And I had, as I detailed in the book, detailed disappointing relationships over and over and over and over again until I became aware of that template. My analyst now I'm in my mid 30s. My analyst says, I think you're using your mother's template in your love life. And that was a shock to me. Like, what are you talking about? So I took a break from dating for a while and interestingly enough, I never had any sisters. But I became very close friends with several women, one in particular, my best friend, for a number of years, maybe about five total. And I learned quite a bit about female psychology, so to speak. It was like an internship, you know what I mean? I never had a sister. My mother and my grandmother were the prototypes that existed in my family for the type of woman that I should find and marry. So I didn't have any broader experience to compare. And so I learned that women could be independent, women could be not controlling, and women could be intimate instead of self centered. And so interesting that as that process went on, those five years where I was paddling around with this person and I learned these things and we were dating, but the dating was never serious. It was kind of a time I was taking a break from my love life, in a way, and just working on myself, in a sense. And then when that was over, so interesting, my wife popped up. She called me up. She was somebody that I knew from a clinic that I worked in years before, six years. I knew my wife for about six years. I didn't have regular contact with her, but I knew her and she came back into my life. And it's strange how it occurred at that time. And we lived together for a while, and then we got married, and she's an independent, not controlling, not self-centered person. So I realized that there was a process here that can affect one's love life and where your love life goes from being unconsciously driven to consciously managed, where you become aware of who's ready for a relationship and who isn't. Things like that occur and what you don't want to repeat. And I went through that process, and that was one of the major reasons I mentioned earlier why I wrote the book, because I wanted to really invite people. I think talking about my own love life was a way to make it a little easier for people to look and say, okay, this guy, he had an experience, he's writing about it. It's not just all book learning or learning from patients necessarily. It's something he personally experienced.

[42:09] Moira: I sort of relate to what you're saying because in my case with Cliff is cliff and myself, we had dated and I was engaged before, and all the rest of it didn't go through. But I came to a point when I reached 30 that I thought, I'm not going to look anymore. If it's supposed to happen, it happens. If I'm supposed to have children, it happens. I was even looking to be up in the bushes, like living with a hot, good wine, good music, good food, outdoors. I literally had to stop looking because I thought, well, maybe that's not my path. And then as soon as I stopped looking, Cliff showed up.

[42:45] Thomas: Interesting.

[42:46] Moira: It is interesting. And I had just came back to Canada. I was in Europe at the time, and made the decision to come back to do an NLP course. And he was in the course, and literally I was not looking. And then, boom, there he is.

[43:01] Thomas: Yeah. I think when people stop looking like you're talking about something important is happening in their psychology, it might be one thing that ran through my mind as you were telling me this is, I thought maybe the act of not looking was an act of acceptance of you. Like, I'm going to do me for a while. I'm going to be me. Do me. And I think that's a very powerful statement about a person's individuality, and it's kind of important. Sometimes when we're looking, there's a sense of desperation. There's a sense of like, oh, ****, the clock is ticking. Oh, I can hear a clock. Tick, tick, tick. I have to find somebody. And it's not really the best condition when you find someone at all. You scare people off that way. Or you get equally desperate people to respond when you say, no more. I'm not going to be desperate. If it shows up, it shows up. Let me give it to God. So give it to the universe. If it happens, it happens. There's something about that that allows a person, OK, let me go from desperation to being me to being my true self to being me. And it's so interesting. You described him as you said, what my true love? My soulmate, my true soulmate. Well, true soulmate matches true self. Those are on the same line in the same continuum. So that's what I think happened. That would be my opinion.

[44:39] Moira: I also tell people that I love Cliff more today than the day I married him. And that's going through the marriage, the up and down the valleys, that's cool.

[44:48] Thomas: I love that. That's great. That's a maturing love.

[44:52] Moira: Oh, for sure. And even when we're a partner in a store, let's say he's somewhere over getting something, and I'm there, just looking at him lights me up.

[45:01] Thomas: He's a lucky man. He's a lucky man.

[45:05] Moira: We're both very lucky. Thomas, what's your vision for the next ten years? Where do you see your work going in the impact and you want to leave the legacy of your work? What do you see in ten years?

[45:17] Thomas: Yeah, well, since I've written the book, you are my, I think, 47th podcast. I'm on podcast interviews around the world. I want to talk about this because I really feel like people need to become aware of how to work on their love lives and reverse this divorce rate, perhaps. And so a book was the beginning, a website was part of the beginning. But I've been crafting a PowerPoint presentation, and I'm interested in getting in front of audiences, either virtual or live, because I'm exploring the use of imagery to really make a point, to invite people's emotional responses, the type of emotional sponsors that help us learn, that make us focus. And I found some very interesting images that helped do that. I've been crafting this PowerPoint for a number of years now. I'm looking this fall into the spring to really begin doing that. So that's one idea that I'm very excited about, the idea of having an audience, really feeling the message and doing a bit of a Q and A at the end of that presentation and having a dialogue with individuals in the audience. Really, it just turns me on if you don't.

[46:51] Moira: No, that's funny. It's your passion.

[46:54] Thomas: And you're like, big time. I love it. I love it. And my wife my wife and I offer love life consultations, too. We're doing telehealth stuff online with people who have an interest in this message, an interest in the unlearning method, who become aware that they're struggling with a disappointing love life and need a little support, a little guidance through the process of making a change. So we offer telephone work that's really coming to vogue now as the pandemic begins to wane. It's convenient for people. It's an easy way to talk with people about what's going on in their work on their own love life. So we're doing some of that as well.

[47:46] Moira: It's wonderful. Thank you, Thomas. I ask each of one of my guests to share a unique gift that you've created for them today. Please share what that is. And I want everyone to know all the links to Dr. Thomas Jordan. And the gift will be below in the show notes.

[48:01] Thomas: And when you say uniqueness, a uniqueness, you're talking about I'm sorry, I want to understand how you mean.

[48:08] Moira: Well, unique for me is that you've set it up for the people who are listening, who are spending the time to listen to our heartfelt conversation today. And I know it's a time sensitive gift that you're giving, which I think is pretty cool.

[48:21] Thomas: Yes, I'm offering a free copy of my book, a printed copy of my book, and or digital, whichever is preferred. And for the first ten people that respond to my email address, Dr. Tmjordan@gmail.com, they can just send me a note that they're interested in the book, digital or print, and I will send them a copy.

[48:52] Moira: Thank you. That's very generous. And, yes, I think you're going to be getting some emails from people.

[49:00] Thomas: Good. The books available on Amazon.com for anyone interested in it. And my website is thelovelifelearningcentre.com great.

[49:13] Moira: We'll have all those links below in the show notes. I create a transcription for each podcast so they'll have that there also.  Thomas, thank you so much for sharing from your heart and soul your wisdom on healing your disappointing love life.

[49:28] Thomas: Thank you for inviting me, Moira. Thank you.

[49:30] Moira: You're welcome.

[49:38] Outro: Thank you for listening to the Heart Soul Wisdom podcast with Moira Sutton. I hope you enjoyed today's episode. Please join our community at Moira Sutton.com and continue the discussion on our Facebook page. Create the life you love. You will be part of a global movement connecting with other heart-centered people who are consciously creating the life they love on their own terms. Together, we can raise our consciousness for the greater good of humanity and for our planet.