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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
John Kim
Started reading
February 28, 2021
Growth can’t happen without new experiences. Love is no exception. The good news is that you can have these new experiences with the same person. But only if both of you put effort into growing, changing, and evolving together by growing, changing, and evolving individually. You have to grow individually if you want to grow as a couple.
How do I create healthy new love experiences that will eclipse the old ones—and pave over the unhealthy ones—and give me new definitions of love?
You can make the one you’re in now a new love experience.
Clearing out your relationship residue can bring self-awareness you never had before.
It was the energy, intention, and curiosity behind her touch.
someone else (a woman) would bring me happiness. With that person, I would be valuable, accepted.
With no tools or knowledge of what a healthy relationship actually looks like, we love strictly with what we feel and what we’re used to. Love then becomes a knee-jerk response to the other person stemming from our wounds, a way to fill holes in ourselves.
relationships meant constantly looking inward, expressing your truth, and holding a safe space for your partner.
Taking ownership and creating a space is what it means to love. Looking inward without defensiveness is what it means to love.
Real love doesn’t knock your socks off. Real love holds up a mirror.
We connect and disconnect with ourselves constantly, depending on where we’re at in our lives, what we’re going through, and the quality of our relationships.
But it’s not about how many people you sleep with. It’s about being in a healthy place when you sleep with other people.
You’re not fucking your feelings away. You are exploring your sexuality.
It’s always a bad sign when someone sends their partner to me without coming along themselves. It’s a move loaded with control and expectations, and it always backfires on the partner who stayed home. They don’t realize how quickly their partner working on the relationship is about to outgrow them.
How has this played out in my life
Therapists are not doctors. We don’t “fix” anyone. We’re more like fertilizer. We sit in shit all day and use it to help people grow.
“Out of your head, out of your house.”
Most people think that when they leave a session with their therapist changed and full of new insight, the therapist stays there like a revelation vending machine, just waiting for the next client to punch the machine and come in to receive new insights and revelations. But the truth is, therapists also have revelations and gain insight about our own lives during sessions and afterward. Sessions with our clients affect us as much as they affect our clients. Sometimes more.
Ask yourself which pistons you need to get pumping again.
Any movement that produces dopamine but also requires discipline.
I started liking myself only when I started listening to myself, treating myself better, and practicing self-compassion, self-care, and self-discipline, all of which shaped my character.
Because it’s not just how you look and feel that becomes unattractive, but the fact that you don’t care about how you look and feel.
If you want your partner to continue to be attracted to you, you have to continue to work on being attractive.
You’re not taking care of yourself for someone else.
“Closure” requires nothing from the other person involved.
We’ve been through a lot together and all is forgiven.
Closure means making a decision to let go of their journey and focus on your own.
What I needed was an identity. I had lost it in my marriage. I had no sense of self. No life direction. I was the guy married to her. That’s it. That’s all I was. So I held on to the marriage because, without it, I didn’t know who I was. And since I didn’t know who I was and had no sense of self, I didn’t feel like I had any value.
When we chase old feelings, experiences, and definitions, we are not allowing new ones in. I hadn’t
She didn’t have joy, engagement, or meaning in her life,
Today I still write. But not to sell. I write to help as many people as I can. It’s meaningful to me. Even texting has become meaningful: I send out thousands of texts each day, hoping to give someone a new mindset or at least some kind of daily reminder. I have built friendships that are meaningful. I find meaning in my fitness. I use it to connect to my body. My motorcycle is meaningful.
When you do things that truly matter to you, that line up with your truth and your story, you not only live closer to your potential but you become lighter, and lighter turns into happier.
experience more joy in my life. The joy of a quiet morning
Many of us forget that a rich colorful life doesn’t just happen. We have to engage in it for color to appear, and it requires effort and intention.
What does engagement look like? Calling friends and making an effort to hang out with them. Being vulnerable with your partner. Finally expressing how you feel. Even drawing boundaries is engagement. Engagement can mean jumping into the freezing ocean. Doing things out of your comfort zone. Switching shit up, like taking a different way home so you can see something new. Engagement can mean accepting, forgiving, apologizing, taking ownership. Engagement can mean dancing even if you’re embarrassed. It can simply mean getting out of your fucking house. Because not doing anything is not
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The greater the contrast between your blueprint and your actual life, the more anxious and unhappy you are. So
Here’s my blueprint today.
TIME TO MAKE SHIT HAPPEN
Worth is something you build.
New experiences → Shifts in beliefs → New definitions → More new experiences
Internalized anger at yourself destroys self-worth.
Every. Single. Day.
