It Begins with You: The 9 Hard Truths About Love That Will Change Your Life

by Jillian Turecki

I learned that a relationship is like a mirror: it will reflect to us the relationship we have with ourselves.

The most valuable lesson I learned about relationships from my marriage was that no relationship has a chance if we don’t look within and do the necessary self-examination required to make it work. When we improve the relationship we have with ourselves, we improve our relationship with others. This is an absolute truth.

The quality of our lives is largely determined by our daily habits and patterns.

Students of yoga learn that not only is the body a window into our emotional state, but it is also through the body that we can change our emotional state.

A tense body is a tense mind. A tense mind is a tense body. That tension that we feel in our bodies is a sign of some sort of imbalance, because tension is the body’s response to feeling unsafe and out of control.

If we want to get better at relationships, we must face our fears and be willing to make mistakes. There’s no way around it. That’s “the work.” To be clear, though, each of us is a work in progress. Our task is not to become invincible. We do not have to become fearless, free of trauma, and happy all the time to have a healthy and fulfilling relationship. And although awareness is key, we can’t stop there.

we have much more influence over a relationship than we think we do: by changing ourselves, we have the power to change our relationships. Taking responsibility for our love lives is what heals.

By taking responsibility, we choose ourselves.

You have to be the love you wish to amplify.

In order to heal our love lives and learn how to cocreate a healthy relationship with someone, we must first understand that everyone is afraid that they are not good enough in some way:

no one wants to be rejected or abandoned, and we will do almost anything to prevent it from happening to us. We’ll cling, lie, please, avoid, yell, cry, shut down, pretend to be someone we’re not, strategize, manipulate, isolate, or end things first just so we don’t have to feel the immense pain of someone losing interest in us or falling out of love with us.

We have to understand the ways in which we struggle to feel we are enough and how our fear impacts our relationships. If you want to understand your patterns, you need to know what you habitually do and the choices you make when you feel insecure and afraid that love might be withheld from you or that you might not be chosen by someone you want.

“He’s totally avoidant. He won’t communicate. Every time I want to talk about a problem, he just makes some excuse about why he’s too busy to talk about it. I want to fix our marriage. I want to fight for our relationship, but I can’t do it alone.”

don’t project your personal experience onto your client, always question the story they tell themselves, and remember that there’s always another side to the story

Most of us, if we’re honest with ourselves, would admit that at some point in a relationship, we’ve withheld affection and our love in an attempt to get more of our partner’s attention.

Deep down, she felt unlovable, insecure, and confused about why his feelings for her had changed. She felt unchosen.

“When you realize that you don’t have to heal, fix, or rescue someone in order to feel significant and worthy, you will start choosing partners who do not need to be saved.”

No one teaches us how to love when we’re scared, overwhelmed, angry, or stressed. No one teaches us how to pick our partners; no one teaches us that our childhood conditioning shows up in our adult relationships. No one teaches us what it means to be a good partner—or how to give our hearts to good people and protect them from not-so-good people. But you can learn.

Whenever she felt insecure, instead of taking a moment to collect her intense emotions, she would immediately react and pick fights with her partners. Part of our work together was to teach her how to stretch the time between being activated by something and responding to it.

Personal responsibility is the only way to create change. A big part of personal responsibility lies in how we care for ourselves.

Being highly sensitive is not a character flaw. It is your nature. Being a giver means you value generosity and you derive joy from giving to others. It is not a flaw. Rejecting your own high sensitivity will force you into a war with yourself. You must honor this part of you, while also taking measures to balance your mind and body to be more resilient.

Taking charge of our lives means we commit to practices that we need in order to function better.

feel more balanced between their body and mind: long walks, yoga, Pilates, weight training, swimming, and dancing.

To be childlike is to be open, curious, adventurous, silly, and whimsical. Much of our inner work is actually learning how to return to the more playful, adventurous, creative parts of ourselves, unburdened by all the rules and expectations we live by. Play is what gets us out of our heads and into the present moment.

Even in your weakest moments, you have the power to heal.

Relationships suffer when we get stuck in our heads, not communicating, creating stories that have little basis in reality.

the more we convince ourselves that we know what the other person is thinking and feeling, the easier it is for us to feel rejected, frustrated, angry, and hurt.

Because he didn’t console her out of her anxiety, she concluded that not only did he not care about her, but he also wasn’t able to fully meet her needs. He doesn’t validate my feelings; he doesn’t care; he doesn’t get me became the incantations that would hypnotize her into questioning her marriage.

They feel they need to excel in everything they do—motherhood, relationships, work, maintaining their bodies, and hobbies—and they just keep filling their plates with more tasks and responsibilities. Then, as soon as they sense that they’ve taken on more than they can handle, they panic and ultimately feel inadequate. They feel like failures.

She had fallen prey to the belief that if he really loved me, he would ______. Kelly’s mind had become a battlefield,

Sometimes, the person you love can’t show up for you at the level that you need them to because they’re too caught up in problems, stress, and feelings of unworthiness that have nothing to do with you. Sometimes the person you love wants something different from what you want out of life.

Instead of recognizing that the person we love needed to help themselves before they could be in a relationship, we tell ourselves a fiction: that they left because we’re not enough for them to stay. That is the lie that destroys our lives.

But here’s the truth: we can love each other and mean a lot to each other and still break each other’s hearts.

Practice paying attention to when you are ruminating, obsessing, or saying negative things

We become divorced from the wisdom of our hearts, intuition, and rational thinking. When this happens, we unintentionally become individualistic, selfish, and self-obsessed.

This “amazing” person doesn’t seem as enamored by you anymore, and you don’t know how to make sense of it. The truth is, you’re heartbroken.

The truth is, some people are ready for a connection, not a relationship.

how much you like him and how strong your connection feels, but right now he’s not acting like someone who wants your connection to evolve into a relationship.

The emotional intensity of lust can feel a lot like love, but it isn’t. It’s an infatuation with a dream. It’s the escape from the fear that we will be alone forever. It is chemistry.

Feeling wanted feels really good, but being desired is not the same thing as being valued.

the stronger their desire, the weaker t...

The truth is, “The One” is not a person. It is a metaphor for hope, change, and novelty.

The truth is, that incredible feeling of wholeness and aliveness is an emotional state of being that comes from deep within ourselves. That deep, blissful pure love we feel when we’re falling in love is simply a reminder of the love and joy we’re capable of experiencing. It reveals the love and passion that are already inside of us, waiting to be recognized and awakened, with or without the presence of a romantic partner.

People often fall in lust with their projected illusions of each other. Mature love says: I see all of you and I accept all of you.

To make a relationship thrive, we have to understand that love isn’t just a feeling. We have to do love.

To love someone involves collaboration, negotiation, resisting the comfort zone, and togetherness as well as distance.

To love someone is to love them in the ways that they need us to, not just in the ways that are comfortable for us.

To love someone is to accept their past and commit to not being a continuation of the part of their past that has caused them hurt and suffering.

To love someone is to consistently remind ourselves that the person we claim to lov...

And the truth is we can’t say, I like you mostly, but if you could only change these three things, then I could really love you. You can’t play that game with yourself or another person. To accept someone for who they are is to accept their flaws. That doesn’t mean that someone gets a pass to treat you disrespectfully.