In this episode, Mark Groves discusses the importance of trusting yourself and the key to navigating relationships and personal growth. Mark shares insights from his own journey, including leaving a secure career, embracing sobriety, and navigating relationship endings with integrity. He also delves into the importance of choosing self-alignment over people-pleasing, distinguishing intuition from trauma, and building self-trust through small commitments.
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Key Takeaways:
- Personal growth and transformation through self-awareness
- The distinction between healthy shame and toxic shame
- The impact of sobriety on personal relationships and self-identity
- The importance of living with integrity and aligning with one’s authentic self
- The complexities of love, commitment, and personal responsibility in relationships
- The role of attachment styles in relationship dynamics
- The significance of grief in the process of change and healing
- Building self-trust through small, achievable commitments
- The transformative power of embracing vulnerability and truth in relationships
Mark Groves is a Human Connection Specialist, founder of Create the Love and host of the Mark Groves Podcast. In other words, he’s a speaker, writer, motivator, creator and collaborator. Mark’s work bridges the academic and the human, inviting people to explore the good, the bad, the downright ugly, and the beautiful sides of connection.
Connect with Mark Groves: Website | Instagram | Facebook
If you enjoyed this conversation with Mark Groves, check out these other episodes:
How to Make Great Relationships with Dr. Rick Hanson
How to Have Healthier Relationships with Yourself and Others with Jillian Turecki
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Episode Transcript:
Eric Zimmer 00:01:01 We often think love means holding on, but sometimes real love is letting go. Choosing truth over clinging even when it hurts. My guest today, Mark Groves, knows this from experience. When faced with a relationship he deeply valued, he chose not to abandon himself for the sake of staying. That choice changed his life and his work. In our conversation, we explore attachment, self, betrayal, and the radical honesty it takes to build relationships that expand rather than diminish us. I’m Eric Zimmer and this is the one you feed. Hi Mark, welcome to the show.
Mark Groves 00:01:41 Hi. I’m so excited to be here.
Eric Zimmer 00:01:43 Yeah, I am really happy to have you on. You’ve got a podcast called the Mark Groves Podcast, which I love. You also do a lot of work around relationships. You’ve got a new book coming out in the spring, so there’s a lot of things for us to talk about. But before we do, let’s start like we always do with the parable. In the parable, there’s a grandparent who’s talking with our grandchild, and they say, in life there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle.
Eric Zimmer 00:02:07 One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandchild stops and they think about it for a second. They look up at their grandparents. They say, well, which one wins? And the grandparent says, the one you feed. So I’d like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do.
Mark Groves 00:02:30 Yeah. You know, when I first heard that parable, I loved interviewing you because you talked about how the parable just makes a simple human experience become very obvious. You know that idea? You can’t see the forest when you’re in the trees. I think that parable really allows you to see the trees. And for me, that exemplifies what we focus on, what we choose to become. You know, I think all choices in life are either pro-life or pro death. And I know that sounds very binary, but I do actually believe that in that you are either making choices that are moving you towards who you want to become and expanding you or you’re not.
Mark Groves 00:03:05 And I think when we get really real about that, then we can actually change our lives. We can actually say, is this choice in this moment, one that is moving me towards what I want to create? And the parable also points to that. We all have the capacity to be both. We are always taking different intersections. In time. We think about the butterfly effect of doing something, you know, going into the past and doing something and messing up the present today. But we don’t often think about the butterfly effect of this present moment and actually creating a beautiful transformation to the future.
Eric Zimmer 00:03:37 Yeah. Let’s dive into that statement a little bit more, that every choice is either pro life or pro death. And again, for a lot of Americans, I’ll hear the term pro-life and they’re going to get a certain connotation. Yeah. Yeah.
Mark Groves 00:03:49 Right. Yeah.
Eric Zimmer 00:03:50 We could we could say it’s towards love or fear or it’s a life enhancing choice or a life denying choice, right? There’s all these things.
Mark Groves 00:03:57 Good point on the wording.
Eric Zimmer 00:03:58 But let me ask about that, because there’s a lot of choices in life that seem relatively mundane. And they also taken alone. They might not feel life enhancing. We talked about this when you and I talked on your show. We talked about context. So let me give you an example. Yeah. You know, let’s say I’ve got four children and I’m a single mom and I’m going to work today. Like going to work today doesn’t feel life enhancing, right? But is part of a bigger picture, which is the ability to provide for my children. Is life enhancing is a value of mine. You know, how do you think about that when the choices may not, in the short term, feel like they’re life enhancing, but they are in the broader picture. How do you think through that?
Mark Groves 00:04:41 Yeah, I mean, that’s a beautiful context, because when you broaden the way that you look at that and for me, changing my child’s diaper is not life enhancing, but it is for my child, you know, and it brings connection and love and all those types of things.
Mark Groves 00:04:54 But when you look at things like the example you’re giving and you can put it in the greater context, then you can at least make it mean something, right? Like it’s contributing to something. For sure, any form of transformation, giving up sugar, giving up any form of addiction. These things are not, in the moment, expansive. They don’t feel expansive. No, especially the rock bottoms especially, you know, when you don’t pick up that thing again. And when we look at the greater scheme of what we want to create though, and that’s really the context. You know, the idea that expansion is free of suffering, you know, that’s not true. I know that’s not true. When we learn the value of different emotions, we won’t try to save other people from them either. You know, like when I found deep grief and I actually was in it sober, it transformed me in the most beautiful way. And now when I see people experiencing grief, going through breakups, going through endings, going through whatever it might be losses, I don’t try to save them from it because I know the alchemical elixir that is at hand.
Mark Groves 00:05:55 What’s being invited from life is to deepen us. So that’s sort of how I think about it. But I think when we’re in survival mode, then of course, we need to have compassion for the choices we’re making when we’re trying to make ends meet. We have to have compassion, you know? Eating fast food might not be a life quote unquote enhancing choice, but it is if it’s going to nourish you to get you to the next day. So I think your conversation about context, I think, is so important, pro-life and pro death as a way of categorizing choices, which, let’s say, love and fear. Yeah, that’s better word choice in the future. Those, at least they seem very harsh as the way we categorize them. But I think when we can sit with the truth of something like this is something temporary, we’re negotiating with ourselves. I think often of the words of Ram Dass, he said that I hope I live with the integrity, that the truths that live within me are the truths that live outside of me.
Mark Groves 00:06:49 And when those two things are not aligned, I’m sending a message of both love and fear. And I think about that a lot of like, we are all, almost all of us sitting on untapped wisdom. We know that something’s not good for us and we continue to choose it. And it was when I finally made the choice in my life that I would live at the highest level of knowledge that was available to me, in that if I knew something needed to change, I wanted to create a line of integrity that had changed. Not in a month, not in six months, but actually the moment I recognize it. And to me, that really allowed me to honor the suffering I was experiencing because no longer was I tried to avoid the shame of the awareness that it wasn’t good for me. I was actually learning from the shame, a healthy level of shame, which really says there’s a better behavior available to you. And I think a lot of us are sitting on the knowledge that there’s a better behavior available to us.
Mark Groves 00:07:41 And I would argue that that is a key to a lot of our suffering.
Eric Zimmer 00:07:44 Boy, there’s a lot of things in there I would love to dive into, but I’m going to go with the healthy shame piece. Let’s talk about that, because shame is generally used as a phrase that is not good for us. You know, we all know there’s an unhealthy shame. So maybe talk to me about to you what the difference between shame in the fear sense. Right back to our positive and negative choices. You know, the negative form of shame and the positive form of shame. And is there another word that might be better for people than positive shame? Or why do you use that word?
Mark Groves 00:08:20 Well, I think we try to avoid feelings that are categorized as negative. You know, our society sends the message that sadness, grief, those types of things, that means there’s something wrong with you as opposed to your emotions are actually information. Now, in Brené Brown, when she talks about shame versus guilt, she talks about guilt being I did something wrong, shame being I am something wrong.
Mark Groves 00:08:41 And I think that’s important for context. But shame as an evolutionary emotion one people experience shame in order to be part of a group, right? To make sure that their behavior is simulated. So they didn’t get kicked out of the tribe, but also so the tribe had behaviors and values that were aligned. But it can also be weaponized. And when belonging is weaponized against people, then humans essentially have two needs. And this is from the work of Gabor Mate. We have the need to self express and be authentic, and we also have the need to belong. But when self-expression threatens belonging, belonging usually wins. So for the most people, they have learned to self abandon in order to maintain group membership, whether that’s a relationship, a family, a culture, a church. You know, what happens is, is we forget about ourselves, we forget about ourselves, and we prioritize connection to other over connection to self. You know, essentially codependency. Now when I think about healthy shame, I think about healthy shame in the context of the awareness that there is an authentic self expressed, more aligned in Tigres version of us that we are being called towards.
Mark Groves 00:09:50 And so it’s not something to be numbed or avoided, it’s actually something to be turned towards. But in our culture, modeling that, turning towards, you know, like most families, most relationships, most cultures pivot around the truth. They don’t talk about the elephant in the room. Whole family systems and roles and families are designed in order to not talk about dad’s alcoholism or mom’s addiction, or the narcissism or the abuse. Everyone takes on a role to make sure no one suffers too much, and no one turns towards this thing. And so we learn to not turn towards our stuff. And so part of that sort of invitation, by using the word healthy shame, is really the reclamation of the word to it doesn’t mean that there isn’t a such thing as toxic shame, which is to take a behavior and make it that we are something bad. And then what we do is we sit in the belief that there’s something wrong with us, as opposed to something wrong with our behavior. Does that make sense?
Eric Zimmer 00:10:47 Totally.
Eric Zimmer 00:10:48 Totally makes sense. Earlier you mentioned a rock bottom. You mentioned giving up behavior. I know that you sort of found your way into sobriety, and I was wondering if we could just talk a little bit about what brought you there and how you got sober and what that means to you.
Mark Groves 00:11:04 Yeah. You know, sobriety was chasing me for a long time, as I’m sure is true for many people. It’s interesting because sobriety originally became a concept that I really looked at in my relationship to alcohol. You know, my relationship to alcohol was very much like a normalized how culture is. You know, in college I binge drank, you know, once a week I would go out and get pretty hammered. And I was at this conference and I was listening to this former investment banker speak, and he was saying that, you know, he was partying, living on four hours of sleep at night. And I didn’t get to the, like, extreme drugs or anything like that. But I was feeling like maybe I should try not drinking like that was kind of the, you know, came as this little.
Mark Groves 00:11:46 Maybe you should just try that. And when I was listening to him speak, he said, what is something that you value more than anything in the world? And for me, it was connection. And I realized that through drinking, I had time traveled and not been present to connection. And I thought, oh my God. Well, the very choice I’m making is actually harming the very thing I value most. It’s in. And I really started to see, just like the immediacy of life, the importance of every moment, actually two moments, one with a friend of mine on a bachelor party and he wasn’t drinking, and there was about 12 of us there. And I said to him, you don’t drink. And he was like, super fun, super cool guy. And I had not been to a bachelor party sober. You know how when you’re thinking about getting sober, there’s always another event that’s keeping you from getting sober? Right, right, right. Wedding bachelor. Right. And so he said to me, when my wife left me the next day, I got sober because I knew if I didn’t, it wouldn’t be good.
Mark Groves 00:12:44 And he said, that was four years ago, and it’s been the best choice I’ve ever made in my life. And I was like, okay, God’s given me more messages here. And then I was listening to a book from Paul Selig, and in the book there was this line where he said, your body is only able to. Alchemy is the lowest level of truth you’re willing to hold. And I was like, wait, what? I don’t know what that means, but I knew there was something in it. And he said, what truths do you know that you are not living in immediately? It was like, I need alcohol to connect. I need alcohol to escape. You need to quit drinking. And then there was this line where he said, it’s like being a fish living in an aquarium who learns about the ocean and goes back to the aquarium and pretends they don’t know. And I was like, I quit right after that because I recognized that I was sitting on an untapped awareness, that it was gnawing at me, and I was afraid of all the things I was going to lose.
Mark Groves 00:13:40 I was afraid of what people would think. How would I hang out at a guy’s trip? How would I do all these things? But I realized how codependent that was. For me, it was like, how do I heal and step into my full power regardless of what people think? And I recognized that continuing to drink was a way to continue to maintain group membership. And I was like, well, then I’m still not sovereign. I’m still not a self because I’m dependent on this thing in order to be with people, because it’s a ritual, because culture just says, this is what you do. And when I made that rule, there was an annual guy’s trip that I’d been on for 17 years. Coming up, there was a bachelor party, and there was a wedding I was emceeing all within like three months of quitting. And I mean, the first event I went to, I was like, I’m now the designated driver. People love that.
Eric Zimmer 00:14:30 Yep. I’ve been that way for a long time.
Mark Groves 00:14:33 Yeah. And then the second part that was really interesting, was that it started to make other people think about their relationship to sobriety. And you know what transformed for me after that? You know, I listen to the spiritual teacher. I went to this retreat. Her name was Ganga ji. And she said, you need to get sober from everything that pulls you away from who you are. And I recognized there’s a few more things I need to get sober from. And I started to realize that it was sugar. It was destructive techniques. It was reactive behavior. You know, all these things that robbed me from being in my essence. So yeah, people pleasing. That was another one.
Eric Zimmer 00:15:12 What does that mean to you to be in your essence?
Mark Groves 00:15:15 For me, it means to be in alignment with what I’m feeling called towards, with what I need to express. Like in my partnership, our dedication is to truth. It’s the truth first. We previously were together for five years and we broke up and when we broke up, it was the ending of two patterns that we had long before each other.
Mark Groves 00:15:35 And, you know, there’s this moment where throughout the first five years, Kylie, that’s her name. Sometimes she would have these sort of like gnawing dreams, like, this isn’t the relationship for me. I need to leave this. And she didn’t know why she couldn’t make sense of it. She loved the relationship. She loved being in a relationship with me. We had fun. We were two people who were very desiring of growth and transformation, and so we tried to work through it. And she told me this, you know, I felt her feeling distant and I was like, hey, what’s going on? And she told me about this dream she had. And it was, you know, living in her psyche. It kept being there and it kept holding her back from opening. And, I mean, we did all the things, you know, we went we had a psychotherapist, we did retreats individually. We did them together. And, you know, we got to this place where I was like, if in order for you to maintain and stay in this relationship, you have to believe there’s something wrong with you, like something wrong with your intuition that the truth you’re getting is actually not the truth that we’re going to live.
Mark Groves 00:16:37 And I said, I can’t be in a relationship that requires you to abandon your inner truth. And I said, and although that’s painful for me, like the life I want to create and I want to create a family, I want to do it with you. But if you’re not feeling called towards this, I love you and I love you. Whether this goes on or it doesn’t. And that was like one of the first times I faced an ending. I’d been heard before I’d been heard in a previous relationship, and I didn’t know why I needed to leave. I just felt called towards it, and it was one of the hardest decisions I ever made. It was actually probably the first decision that I made for myself in my late 20s, but probably in my life. It was finally something where I was like, I needed to free myself from the narrative. You get married by this age, you have kids by this age, and if you don’t, do you live the sort of story, this type of job, this type of fucking degree? If you don’t do those things, there’s something wrong with you.
Mark Groves 00:17:30 And so I finally opted out. It took a while, but I finally opted out and when I faced her in that moment, what I desperately wanted when I was on the other side was someone to say, I love you. Like you’ve got to choose what you got to choose. But love is not committed to being together. It’s committed to truth. And what’s strangely paradoxical about that is that the conversations that could end our relationship, which we often avoid because society actually grades relationships based on their status, but also based on their longevity. So because our value is often perceived in our relationship status, but also the things we achieve, but because it’s often based in our relationship status, we won’t have the conversations that might end it, and we won’t be ourselves if being ourselves might end it. But the irony is, those are the exact conversations that actually deepen it. And for us, the ending came, and for me, it was finally ending a pattern where I used to fight. The underlying core belief I had in relationship was nobody chooses me.
Mark Groves 00:18:34 You don’t choose me. You don’t choose me fully. You’re not fully in here. I am loving all out, murdering it right up here. I am loving all out a doormat, chasing what doesn’t want to chase me. And I finally said I’m not chasing anymore and I love you. And she said, I’m no longer going to operate in a relationship that doesn’t honor my intuition. I love you. And so we had a closing ceremony, which was the first time I ever ended a relationship with such intention, which was terrifyingly, devastatingly beautiful and one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do. But what happened was there was this, like, sort of strange change in both of us. We didn’t talk for a while. We went on different directions. The relationship was over. It was over for me. I was not interested in reuniting. The only way I would be interested in reuniting is if I met her in the future. Not going backwards, but like a different narrative, a different story, a different possibility.
Mark Groves 00:19:28 And I mean, what’s so beautiful about it is it ended up being a place that now we honor truth and the conversation that we have. Just to come back to where we started is that it was, you know, I love you, and there’s a security to that. There’s a choice to that. I think of a line that I heard from Jordan Peterson, which everybody think what you want about him, but the line is good, which is commitment only works when you do it. And that to me, I was like, have I ever been all in with someone who’s all in with me? No, I hadn’t, I was terrified of receiving love. I was terrified of being met by somebody. I chased people who weren’t ready, who couldn’t choose me. And when I finally was met by her, I was met by a different woman. You know, we had to repair trust, you know, at the beginning, because she would say, I want to choose this. And I’d be like, I don’t believe you because you said that before.
Mark Groves 00:20:19 And she would say to me, you’re right. I’m not going anywhere. I choose this. And I was like, well, you know, it’s like everything you want to hear is painful, you know, beautiful, but also vulnerable. And I think about the vows people make in relationship. You know, til death do us part is a common one that previously was made. Also honor and obey was to that one’s gone out the window, which is good. But was interesting is I think like is it a mortal death or is it the death of the version of you that chose the relationship at the time? And do our relationships foster a space for us both to grow as individuals, pursue our passions, and step fully into ourselves, and that be actually what cultivates the space between us, which is not the completion of each other, but actually a separate entity that is created by two sovereign whole beings who are celebrated by one another, expanded by one another. And so when we came back together, there was very much a deep intention in that coming back together and a commitment that’s beyond and also a recognition that, I mean, this is an uncomfortable truth that’s true for everybody is in any moment, at any time your partner can decide to leave.
Mark Groves 00:21:31 You can decide to leave. And I think when we can be with the truth of that, then we can be with the power of the choice to be with each other. And we recognize the power of choice. And so for us that has. I mean, it’s completely transformed me because if, you know, at 70 years old, Kylie says to me, I can’t do this anymore. I mean, that would devastate me. And I’m not here to get in the way of the alignment of her soul, of her path. And that I think there’s something liberating about that. I think for some people, though, acknowledging that truth is painful and it’s something we don’t want to look at because we haven’t explored what it means to be alone.
Eric Zimmer 00:22:34 So you described a way there of taking an enormous amount of personal power and responsibility for saying to her, go if you want to go. Right. And I’m just curious how you summoned the ability to do that. I mean, I know you’ve probably done a lot of work on yourself by that point, but boy, that’s a core thing, right? When the person who supposedly loves you says, I don’t know that I do.
Eric Zimmer 00:23:01 It’s really painful to hear that, right? It’s enormously painful, and it’s terrifying to lose a relationship of five years, particularly given it sounds like to you. You knew in some ways this is a person for me, like, this is really valuable, right? So I can’t imagine it was as easy as you just made it sound. You’re definitely right. Right. Like, I can’t imagine you just went. Well. You know what the right thing to do is to say if you want to go, go. And I’m going to live out of my personal power and like, talk to me a little bit about the moment to moment wrestling with that, because I think we all want to be that person.
Mark Groves 00:23:36 Yeah, I.
Eric Zimmer 00:23:37 Agree. We all want to be the person who would say, I love you and I want your growth and I want truth, and if that means it doesn’t include me. Fine. That’s the person we want to be. And I know for me, in relationships, there are plenty of times that the person I want to be is hijacked by, in my case, a lot of early childhood bonding trauma things.
Eric Zimmer 00:23:58 Right. And so the person I want to be just gets swept away. Sometimes that wound gets triggered, and it’s a big one for many of us. Right. And so what was that process actually like for you? How did you say that? How did you mean it? How much did you mean it? What did you do when you desperately wanted to cling? What? I mean, like, just walk me through that. What you did was amazing. And again, as I said. And you just said it’s not easy.
Mark Groves 00:24:24 No, no, because it’s going against the attachment pattern. Right. It’s going against the attachment trauma because yeah, when we have abandonment, rejection wounds, betrayal wounds. Yeah. We usually pick up a few adaptive strategies. You know, one is to chase people and the other is to avoid people. So really our relationship to space is what we’re relating to. I know we think about it’s in relation to other, but it’s really the relationship between space and other.
Mark Groves 00:24:53 And so how we behave in response to space is what’s different. If there’s space I don’t want any space is not safe. If there’s not enough space, I need more.
Eric Zimmer 00:25:04 That’s really interesting. So that speaks to why you could be both avoidant, early attached and anxiously attached, which has been my back and forth throughout my life in earlier relationships was, oh, you’re really into me. I gotta back up and I’m not really that into you. And oh, you’re suddenly not into me. Holy shit! I must have you at all costs. You know.
Mark Groves 00:25:27 I know that feeling.
Eric Zimmer 00:25:27 I think what you’re saying makes sense about that space. It’s the relation to that space. When that space is either too small or too big. We move in a particular direction.
Mark Groves 00:25:36 Yeah, our strategy is just different, but they’re both insecure forms of attachment. And that’s why it’s so easy to pivot between the two, as you’re saying, because you don’t actually become secure. You just pivot between insecurity in strategies that are insecure.
Mark Groves 00:25:51 The other side, when you think about it from a nervous system perspective, is anxiously attached. People, people who are afraid of space have a hard time self-regulating. So being with emotions on their own, sitting in them a little longer. People who are more distant, who push away. They have a hard time regulating being with another person’s nervous system. So when we start to think about the like biological, that needs to heal, right? Which behaviors can heal the biological right? Like, I can make a different choice and my nervous system will get dysregulated, which usually to soothe. I’ll go into a behavior. So if I’m afraid you’re going to take space and I’m anxiously attached and I’m like, you know what, I’m just going to sit a little back and I get this dysregulation. My nervous system kicks up. The way I would soothe that is to maybe text you or chase you or call you. But then I end up again in an insecure relationship because it requires this abandonment of myself and my self-regulation in order to maintain connection.
Eric Zimmer 00:26:51 Check in for a moment. Is your jaw tight, breath shallow? Are your shoulders creeping up? Those little signals are invitations to slow down and listen. Every Wednesday I send weekly bites of wisdom, a short email that turns the big ideas we explore here in each show things like mental health, anxiety, relationships, purpose into bite size practices you can use the same day it’s free. It takes about a minute to read and thousands already swear by it. If you’d like extra fuel for the weekend, you also get a weekend podcast playlist. Join us at One Coffee Net. That’s one you get and start receiving your next bite of wisdom. All right. Back to the show. What do you mean? An abandonment of myself or my self-regulation? In what way is that an abandonment? Because when you’re in it, it feels like you’re doing the one thing that actually can make you feel better. Which I get as I say, that I can see how that’s a parallel to drugs, right? So there’s a clear parallel.
Mark Groves 00:28:00 There, very similar.
Eric Zimmer 00:28:00 In what way to you would that be an abandonment of yourself?
Mark Groves 00:28:04 So let’s say in context for me, in my relationship to Kylie, there’s distance. She’s not sure about the relationship at the core of a five year relationship. About a year in is this dream. So that means unconsciously, although consciously discussed. Disgust. Hey, let’s fix that. Let’s work on that. Unconsciously, my nervous system is going. She’s not actually sure she’s going to be here at any moment. She might leave. So the core of all relationships, whether they’re work or home or love or family, is the essence. The need for psychological safety, the moment someone might leave, which often people threaten in relationship as soon as someone threatens leaving in a relationship, it destabilizes the safety. There’s no psychological safety. So what happens is we might cling. We might do behaviors that try to get more connection, but we’re not dealing with the underlying thing, which is the lack of psychological safety. So our attachment systems, which are basically a radar and all they’re saying is am I safe and secure? Is this relationship safe and secure? So in the research for you, listening, just so you can understand it’s developmental, It’s usually determined before the age of two.
Mark Groves 00:29:21 You can change it. That’s the beautiful thing. So nothing I’m saying is like a destiny. And so, you know, the research is from looking at a young child with her mother. Mother leaves the room, mother comes back, and they look at how the baby responds to mother leaving and coming back first. When mom leaves, mom comes back. Baby is like clings to. Mom doesn’t leave mom’s side. I don’t trust that when you leave you’re gonna come back anxiously attached. Second, when mom leaves, mom comes back. Baby reunites with mom, then goes back to playing I trust you. Thanks for coming back, I got this. I go back to autonomy. Right? Sovereignty. Third one. Mom leaves. Mom comes back. Maybe he’s like, didn’t even notice you were gone. Not really a big deal. Looks ambivalent, but physiologically is actually responding the same way as the first baby. So when we actually look at how we relate to things like someone taking distance, a behavior that would be normal if I was advocating for my need would be, hey, I notice that you’re a little distant.
Mark Groves 00:30:15 I noticed that maybe you’re not texting as much. Here’s what I need. Are you capable of giving that to me? And when the other person says no. If I don’t listen. And now I go into more people pleasing, more attempts to connect, I’m abandoning myself. If I say to someone, hey, here’s what I want to create in a relationship, and the other person says, I don’t really want that. If I chase that, I’m self-managing. If someone says to me, hey, I actually want to create that. And I’m like, all right, here’s what that looks like for me. What does that look like for you? Okay, here’s what it looks like for me. And you know, when Stan Catkins work, he’s a famous researcher on relationships and marriage. He said that the failure of almost all relationships is the failure to create agreements at the beginning. So when we look at that, okay, I’m willing to do that. Here’s what that looks like. And the other person doesn’t actually do it.
Mark Groves 00:31:08 And I continue to try to convince them, change them, move them, shift them. Read this book. Here’s a podcast. Here’s the thing I’m self abandoning because I’m going into this convincing mode as soon as you leave your center yourself. Abandoning. And for a lot of us, leaving, our center is actually what’s familiar. For others, staying in their center without any leaning is actually how they move out of relationship. What I mean is some people prioritize connection to other over their connection to self. That’s usually anxiously attached. Other people prioritize themselves over their relationship to other. That’s avoidant attached. Secure is your needs matter as much as my own. And I’m always drawn by a quote from the Gottman, again, super famous marriage and family researchers. And they said, if there’s one thing that is clear about masters of relationship is that they do not leave their partner in suffering. They repair, they repair, they repair. So when I think about this process. You know, getting back to your original question a long way around the barn.
Mark Groves 00:32:17 As a friend of mine would say. I think about that conversation that, hey, like, I love you. This is what I want to create. If you want to create that, great. If you don’t, I love you. I mean, that was how many years ago? Probably three years. So that was 41 years in the making. So, you know, there was a lot of conversations I didn’t have that were present in that moment. There were a lot of times that I’d stayed with someone who wasn’t choosing me or stayed with someone who betrayed me. There was a lot of moments that led to that moment. So it wasn’t something that took the momentum of just a pep talk. It was sitting with the truth that I had not been fully present and had my own back in so many connections, and I worked with a somatic therapist, and at this point I had a course on boundaries. So let’s be very honest here. And I remember saying to the somatic therapist, like, I’ve got great boundaries like blah blah blah.
Mark Groves 00:33:14 And we went into how I felt, how my nervous system felt when I said, here’s what I want. Here’s the. And I realized that I had so many expressed boundaries, but I kept leaving myself in the circumstances. So I’d say the thing, hey, you know, this is what I want to create. But it wasn’t until that moment which was in a kitchen, which is where so many conversations happen. It wasn’t until that moment I was finally at the place of no more. I was finally at the place of no more, and I was finally at the place where I couldn’t keep going the way I was going. And you know, when I was working with a psychotherapist, I just had this deep moment of awareness where I was like, where did I learn that that was okay? Like, where did I learn that a relationship that doesn’t fully choose me, which was my norm? Or if it wasn’t, it was because I didn’t fully choose another, because I was terrified of being met.
Mark Groves 00:34:11 But I was like, where did I learn that? I didn’t really have an answer yet in that moment. But I just remember grieving because I grieved every moment that I stayed with someone who didn’t choose me, which means I wasn’t choosing myself, which at the end of the day, if I was really taking responsibility for myself, they were a perfect reflection that what I thought I was getting from them, which was finally completing this wound, was never going to be found through them. It was only ever going to be found through me. And that’s when I started. I mean, it really brought full circle so much of my work because I really, you know, we all have this thing that we desperately chase in relationship, and sometimes it’s space. That’s what generally looks a little different, but it’s usually understanding safety, love, connection, choice. There’s always an underlying thing. And the question that really gets to that is you just ask yourself, what is the thing you wanted most as a child and you didn’t get? That’s usually the thing you chase in partnership, and it’s usually what your partner has a hard time giving you and vice versa.
Mark Groves 00:35:11 And I realized that it was through giving those things to yourself that sometimes the relationship could deepen because both people have to move beyond their wounds, which is what brought them together. But other times it’s actually what fractures the relationship. But either way, you’re both liberated from the wound. And so that conversation was one of the hardest conversations I’ve ever had. But I got to tell you, there was sort of like a weird swagger after because I could feel this, like, return of myself, full self, and I could feel that I actually had my own back. Now that, like, if I had to choose between connection to another person and being my greatest fan, my greatest arbiter, my greatest everything, I was going to choose that. And in doing that, I mean, it liberated her because no longer was her desire to. Would I be okay without her? Would she still be loved? She was like, oh, I’m free to choose. He still will love me. And that was true.
Mark Groves 00:36:13 That was proven in how he ended. I hope that answers your question.
Eric Zimmer 00:36:17 It does. Would you consider yourself an anxiously attached person before that?
Mark Groves 00:36:21 Yeah, I’m definitely more prone to that. I got a little creative in my 20s and started to mix it up with some avoidance, just to keep people on their toes. But yeah, I’m definitely much more prone to anxiety. That’s that’s sort of my like default. If there’s instability, you know, anxiously attached people have incredibly unconscious. Their ability to be attuned to facial expression and micro motor movements is really heightened. So that’s what makes anxiously attached people generally really good at things like sales or empathic work, you know.
Eric Zimmer 00:36:54 Yeah. So you had that conversation and then how soon after that did you guys make the decision to to separate?
Mark Groves 00:37:02 Probably about a week.
Eric Zimmer 00:37:04 Okay. So it happened pretty quickly.
Mark Groves 00:37:05 We had had those conversations a few times, like, let’s say over four months. We’d had conversations about the possibility. We did sort of one last Hail Mary.
Mark Groves 00:37:16 We did a weekend with the therapist, and when we left that, we came back. And, you know, we just got to that place that the only thing left to do was not be together anymore. So that conversation had led to the therapist weekend. So by the time, yeah, we actually officially we actually went to go on a break first, which I have a lot of thoughts on breaks. I don’t actually think they’re generally functional. I think they’re generally a tearing down of the relationship to make it less painful, especially for the person ending it. Yeah, but within about three days of the break initiating, I, I was like, this break isn’t going to work for me. Like, I just feel like we’re in more ambivalence, and I’m still in a place where you’re deciding the depth of intimacy and connection, and I’m not into that anymore.
Eric Zimmer 00:38:16 And so you wanted, in a sense, to take the power back and say, I’m not doing this.
Mark Groves 00:38:22 Yeah.
Eric Zimmer 00:38:23 Instead of being in a position of waiting, waiting, wondering, wondering, hoping, hoping you just said enough.
Eric Zimmer 00:38:29 I’m not getting what I need here. I don’t want this.
Mark Groves 00:38:32 Yeah, and it was like I had spent so long, so much of my adult life in relationships where people were deciding what they were ready for, what they could give. And I was like, I’m not into that anymore. It’s not hot. Yeah, it’s not attractive. There was just that switch that went in me that was like, it doesn’t feel good. And it was a familiar feeling I wanted to get rid of because it was a constant longing. Just a longing. And when I could be with that and be like, what am I going to do with this longing? Oh, I’m longing for myself. I know that sounds so cheesy, but it was like the absolute truth. I was longing for myself, the fullness of myself. To have my boundaries, have my voice, to give up the people pleasing bullshit. And that’s why sobriety is so connected to all of that, because so much of it is avoidance of deep feelings, feelings.
Mark Groves 00:39:23 We don’t know how to navigate, feelings. We are afraid we’re going to be swallowed by. And that’s why community is so important, but also because we’re so used to doing what the group does. Think about how many people relapse or how many people continue a behavior because the group around them does. And that was just done with any of that, any symptom of that behavior. I was like, I gotta, I gotta be done.
Eric Zimmer 00:39:45 That’s a really powerful story, and I feel like I could go into it a whole lot more. But I’m going to put a pause on that for now and change directions just a little bit. And I want to talk about, do you have a newsletter or it’s on Substack? And I don’t know if you end all of them this way, but I noticed one post you ended your sign off was trust, Trust. Trust and love. What do you trust in? This is a big one for me, right? But, you know, I feel like with my working with spiritual directors and different people, over time, inevitably, we get back to trust.
Eric Zimmer 00:40:14 What do you trust? And I think it’s a really interesting question. And so when I saw that in you, I was kind of just curious to you. What are you saying trust in.
Mark Groves 00:40:24 Yeah. You know, that’s the only one I’ve signed off on I think like that.
Eric Zimmer 00:40:28 Gotcha.
Mark Groves 00:40:29 I think I mean, I’ve written hundreds, so maybe I’ve done it before. But, you know, I keep being reminded through my own journey and through my own work that nothing is by accident. You know, and and what we’re drawn towards, what breaks our heart. All these things are just so I don’t want to minimize someone’s experience. So when I say this, I’m not doing that, but they’re so perfectly designed. You know, I have a friend named John Morrow, and he says, if you want to find what you love, find what breaks your heart. And that’s been true of my own journey. My own mission has been like the things that have shattered me are the things that have deepened me, are the things that have grown me.
Mark Groves 00:41:09 That when I learned finally to turn towards them with a curious eye. Which doesn’t mean I’m not in the depths of total suffering and need a friend to hold me while I’m doing that. But I really found that so much of my transformation and the things I’m brought alive by, they’re not by accident. And I think the reason I wrote that specific one is because I needed to remind myself that that’s true. I used to be a pharmaceutical rep, actually, for like 14 years, and I was in that industry and I was living the life I was taught to want. And when I finally started writing about relationship and, you know, I went back to school and studied positive psychology and I was ready to leap. I remember talking to people and they’d say, just leap and the universe will catch you. And I was like, that’s so romantic and terrifying. And are you high? Like how you know. But you know, when I finally gave my notice and, you know, I left, like, a really secure job.
Mark Groves 00:42:09 Very golden. Handcuff me. You know, I was making great money. I had a freaking car. I had, you know, a company car. Everything was great, but it wasn’t. And, you know, I remember saying to people, I want to do this. I want to tour the world. I want to speak about relationships. I want to teach people through what I’ve been through. And they would say, why are you not grateful for what you have? As if longing for something different means you’re not grateful, means you can’t have more. And I think it’s because so many people are stuck in mediocrity and afraid of their own potential, that you stepping into yours threatens their untapped potential, makes them feel shame about the choices they’re not making. Which is much like when people get sober, the people around them who know that they want to get sober get triggered by your own choice, which is not different than stepping into your full potential. So for me, really moving into that space of trusting was the first time I gave my notice.
Mark Groves 00:43:03 And I remember my boss at the time, she was incredible. She was like, can you just stay till June? And I’d give him my notice for April. And I like checked in my body and I was like, no, there was like, you can’t. And my dad said to me when I was leaving that job, why don’t you just take a leave of absence? And I was like, dad, that’s like saying, I don’t believe. And I knew that I needed to go to the island and burn the boat. I knew that I needed to jump, and the universe caught me. You know it. It really did. And and not only that, it gave me more than I ever imagined. And it brought me here, you know, today to have a conversation. I had a conversation with you yesterday. That was beautiful. I’d like to have a conversation to be able to share with people listening. And I think you don’t know where this stuff’s going to bring you.
Mark Groves 00:43:49 All you think about is the things you’re going to lose, but you don’t think about the things you’re going to gain because they’re not measurable yet. They’re just a feeling. And if we’re not used to trusting feelings, especially if we’re not connected to our intuition, this is sometimes the step back into that, that space of like, trusting. Like, if we could trust someone else’s truth, that’s their truth. When we can embrace theirs, it’s because we’re able to embrace ours, you know? And I think when we can be with that, like if we have listened to voices, if we have things that are calling to us, which I have had and I’m like, no, no, I got to keep doing the same thing. I gotta still talk about the same things. I gotta do what works. And I just kept realizing, like, here I am not trusting again. What happens when cells start not doing what they’re supposed to do? Not following their intuition, not following their program, you know, in a positive way.
Mark Groves 00:44:41 They become cancer, you know, and I thought, I’m trying to fight the universe. And I remember when Kai and I broke up, I was out at this area in Washington called Mount Baker, and I was meditating. I was in the forest, rain forest. It was like Perfect. And this white butterfly flew up the river in front of me. And I remember thinking to myself, like, what do butterflies even do? You know? I didn’t know. I was like, I don’t even know what they do. They become tattoos, I know that, but they don’t do a whole lot. But I thought, like, he’s not or she or whatever is not thinking about what their job is like. They’re just doing it. Yeah. And I remember getting hit by this from, you know, whatever it is. And it was at what moment did you think you were God, that you thought you knew better than what was being called towards you? I tried to force that relationship for so long because I thought I knew better.
Mark Groves 00:45:37 But inevitably, you end up where you’re being called towards, whether you go screaming or not. You know, and I think about the nudges we get from the universe are usually subtle, but then they get not so subtle. They become cosmic two by fours, you know, and then they become cosmic dump trucks. And I think what I forget is that we might not like the uncomfortable truth we have, but trying to avoid knowing it is what leads to, again, to more addictions. You know, I just grieve so many times in my life that I’ve done that, that I didn’t trust the feeling that I didn’t listen. And, you know, I’ve done it recently again in my life, in not a bad way, but in the way that you continue to learn that you’re like, oh, this is how it works, and it’s how nails grow. It’s how hair grows. Well, most hair, not all my hair, but, you know, it’s it’s how it works. And I think we forget that.
Mark Groves 00:46:30 And so trust, trust, trust was like, hey, like, I know this is a big ask, but I know, you know. And I know for me, when I didn’t like something being true, I tried to do all the research in the world to figure out that it was anything but what I knew.
Eric Zimmer 00:46:46 Yeah, thanks for all that. That’s really powerful. I guess I will say I’m not a person that tends to believe that everything happens for a reason. I wish I believed that I tend to more believe that, you know, not everything happens for the best, but we can make the best out of everything that happens. And I think that’s partially where my trust issues are, is like, I don’t feel like there’s any actual effin plan out there. I mean, it feels like chaos, but something you said did resonate with me, which is that I can trust in some of my inner truth. Now, I think as an addict and as somebody who used to be very anxiously attached and then, as I said, I’m sort of avoidant or anxiously, although in my most recent relationship, I actually have been able to step out of both of those roles.
Eric Zimmer 00:47:30 By and large.
Mark Groves 00:47:31 That’s.
Eric Zimmer 00:47:31 Great. And so what I was saying is, you know, that idea of trusting your intuition is hard for me because my intuition and again, it’s hard to tell intuition from dysfunction sometimes. Right? You know, my dysfunction screamed a lot of things to me. That seemed really true and really loud, that feel very similar to what intuition can feel like. Like it’s this inner knowing.
Mark Groves 00:47:53 Yeah. Agreed.
Eric Zimmer 00:47:54 You know, and I have always wrestled with is this, you know, okay. This inner knowing, you know, what is it? But but when you said like, you know, there are times that we just know the truth. That’s been my experience. Like it took me a long time to get sober, but my inner truth knew for a long time that what I was doing was deeply problematic. Right? I wasn’t ready, I didn’t know how to change it. I wasn’t ready to change it. I didn’t have the tools to change it. Lots of different things.
Eric Zimmer 00:48:19 But I would say probably nine months into my drinking career, I knew like, oh shit, something is amiss here. Like something’s wrong here. And again, it still took me like nine years to to find my way out. I recognized that, like, there are some deeper truths that we do know and they can be really hard to face, but facing them is the way back to ourselves.
Mark Groves 00:48:44 Yeah, it absolutely is. You know that question of how do I distinguish truth from dysfunction? There’s a question that, Doctor Alexander Salmond asked, which is, is this my trauma or my truth? That can be hard to swim through. But I think if you ask the question, which I know, you suggest asking the question, is this thought real? Is this not true? That’s where we begin to build discernment about the information that’s coming in and out of us. And that question isn’t my trauma or my truth. We’re going to get an answer to that, and we’re going to probably not like the answer generally, you know, because it’s going to call us to sit a little longer in something that normally, if it’s trauma especially, is something that regulates us, attempts to regulate us, something that attempts to soothe a feeling that we haven’t sat in.
Mark Groves 00:49:31 So, you know, when I think about being able to differentiate something that’s intuition versus something that’s, let’s say avoidance, I think about things like work. And what I mean by that is it’s easy for us to contextualize what feels right for us and work and what doesn’t. And so if I said to someone, hey, you’re going to get this job, It’s basically the same job as the one you have. It pays about the same. You’re going to have to do some other things. They’re going to be a bit unfamiliar or here’s this job. It’s going to demand so much more of you, more than you even know is possible right now. It’s going to require that you grow. It’s going to require that you learn and it’s going to pay a bit more, maybe, maybe even the same. But the possibility of what’s created from what is going to be asked of you. And we can both sit with that and be like, okay, am I afraid to choose this because I just genuinely don’t want to? Or am I afraid to choose it because it’s going to ask a version of me that doesn’t exist yet? And for me, that’s how I sort of lean into, like, do I not want to do this or do I whatever the behavior is.
Mark Groves 00:50:33 But I’m giving the example of not if do I not want to do this because of it’s just genuine, or do I not want to do it because I don’t even know the mark that can do that yet, and that’s stepping ourselves into unfamiliar, unfamiliar territory that could be like, do I want to step towards this relationship? Like a lot of people will ask questions like, how do I know if I should stay or leave in a relationship? That’s a very common question, and there’s a lot of complexity to that question. One of them is what is your pattern like would be growing for you? Staying because you leave things when they get hard? Or would growing for you be leaving because you stay in things too long? And you know, there’s so many great questions that need to be asked of that. But that’s one way of just beginning to look at in differentiating what you’re inviting, which is being able to see what is intuition. And the other way to really do that is to do small habits.
Mark Groves 00:51:29 There’s a saying that the opposite of trauma is choice. And so let’s say you make the commitment that you’re going to make your bed every day. The reason that’s such a powerful choice to make and to actually do is not because it’s nice having a maid bed, although it is, Is because you’re doing something you say you’re going to do. Yeah. So you can trust your own choices. That way when you get into giant decisions, you actually have a relationship with your own word and a relationship with yourself. That’s why it seems like an arbitrary thing, but it’s not arbitrary at all. Because, you know, if you say, I’m going to go for a walk every day or let’s say five days a week, which is probably a more achievable as you’ve shared, it’s a more achievable thing. And you don’t go and you say to yourself, well, I’m the only one who knows I didn’t go, so it’s no harm to anybody, but it’s actually harm to your own psyche too. So you choose goals that are achievable.
Mark Groves 00:52:26 Choose things that you know you can keep your word towards. And also, you know, as you shared on my podcast, if your pattern is to be really hard on yourself, then the other pattern is to learn how to soften, but also keep your word because you know, as they say in the Four Agreements, you are your word. You got nothing else.
Eric Zimmer 00:52:43 Yeah. I mean, I often think that a meta skill for life is the ability to make and keep promises to yourself. Right. Like, that is what so much of this is about. And it’s why our inability to change behavior sometimes can be. So I think psychologically devastating is because we make promises to ourselves, but we don’t have the capacity to keep them. I was on your show, and we talked a lot about how I don’t think that’s a moral failing. It’s that you don’t have the skills and the tools and the know how. I think of it as a puzzle. There’s a reason that you’re unable to keep these promises to yourself.
Eric Zimmer 00:53:21 Maybe you’re making promises that are too big for yourself. Maybe you don’t have the proper support. Maybe. I mean, there’s a thousand different reasons, but to me, the game is always bigger than. Are you meditating every day? Are you exercising every day? Right. Those things are hugely important. Like. Yeah. You know, I mean, I think they’re really important, you know, to our overall health and well-being. But there’s another cost there. And that cost is I don’t believe and trust myself because I say I’m going to do X, Y, and Z and then I don’t do it. And what most people do again is take that as some personal failure versus a This is a puzzle that I haven’t figured out yet. Why is this? You know, and all sorts of things affect it. But I agree with you that that’s why those little decisions, like making your bed, are actually bigger decisions than they seem.
Mark Groves 00:54:09 Yeah. And, you know, the other part that I find is really interesting about the human experience is that we might actually have never had modeled promises being kept.
Mark Groves 00:54:20 So what’s familiar to our nervous system is actually feeling let down. And so we don’t know what it’s like to rely on someone. And so when we start to be able to rely on ourselves, which is when we stop chasing that from other people, security, safety, all that kind of stuff, when we start to be able to rely on ourselves is unfamiliar. And I think what happens to when? Let’s say we start to choose ourselves. We start to set boundaries. We start to keep our word to ourselves. There is a grief that will come with the change in behavior, because you will grieve all the times you didn’t. And so there’s an awareness that comes with transformation. That grief is just the beautiful price of admission. You know, there’s a saying that grief is love that has nowhere to go. I don’t necessarily agree with that because I actually think grief is love. I think grief is the experience of loss, but that’s only because of the capacity you have for love. And so when you live a new moment as a new you, and you grieve the moments you didn’t do that, you’re actually there needs to be an awareness of gratitude for who you’ve been, because we normally take the parts of ourselves that we’re ashamed of the choice of.
Mark Groves 00:55:33 We’ve made the the bad things we’ve done, quote unquote. And we put them in a box and we are shamed ashamed of and we don’t want to look at them. But actually, part of really true healing and letting go is being able to say thank you by integrating the wisdom that comes from the mistake. If you don’t integrate the wisdom because you’re hiding it away in a box and you don’t want to look at it, you’re robbing yourself of total transformation. You’re robbing yourself of the untapped potential of the mistakes you’ve made. And when you can finally use the laws, the thing that whatever to actually become something, then it actually gives your pain purpose and it allows it to move through you into possibility. And so if you’re familiar with being let down, familiar with not being enough, familiar with rumination, imagine if you start to step into possibility, reliability, potential. You talked about on my podcast The Need to Have Hope. Well, hope is something that you also create. You know, it’s not just something that we might experience through someone else’s story or someone else’s experience.
Mark Groves 00:56:39 I know many people have been brought alive, but what you do and the stories you share and all the things and it awakens in someone what’s already in them. Yes, you know what I mean.
Eric Zimmer 00:56:49 Before you check out, pick one insight from today and ask, how will I practice this before bedtime? Need help turning ideas into action? My free weekly Bites of Wisdom email lands every Wednesday with simple practices, reflection and links to former guests who can guide you even on the tough stuff like anxiety, purpose and habit change. Feed your good wolf at one you feed. Net newsletter again one you feed your net. Well, I think that is a beautiful place for us to wrap up. Mark, I’ve really enjoyed this. I loved getting to dive deep on this idea of not abandoned in a variety of different contexts. We’ll have links in the show notes to where all your stuff is. If you want to just tell people real quick, that’d be great.
Mark Groves 00:57:37 Yeah. So any courses that are. I have one called Rediscover Your Wholeness.
Mark Groves 00:57:40 That’s all about stepping into your full self. Another one on dating, which is about turning dating into a transformative healing process. It’s called dating 1 to 1 and one for breakups. Again, using breakups as the vehicle for evolution. So you can get all that, as you were saying Eric and create the love. Com so links will be in the show notes. Awesome. Thanks Eric I really appreciate you.
Eric Zimmer 00:58:00 Thank you. Mark, thank you so much for listening to the show. If you found this conversation helpful, inspiring, or thought provoking, I’d love for you to share it with a friend. Share it from one person to another is the lifeblood of what we do. We don’t have a big budget, and I’m certainly not a celebrity, but we have something even better. And that’s you just hit the share button on your podcast app, or send a quick text with the episode link to someone who might enjoy it. Your support means the world, and together we can spread wisdom one episode at a time. Thank you for being part of the one You Feed community.
