Stop Pushing Love Away: How to End Self-Sabotage and Let Love In

Stop Pushing Love Away: How to End Self-Sabotage and Let Love In

May 22, 2026 · 32 min · Episode 161

About this episode

Joe and Brett explore the reasons behind self-sabotage in love and provide practices to enhance the capacity to give and receive love.

Most of us say we want love. So why do we push it away the moment it arrives? In this episode, Joe and Brett explore the surprisingly complex reasons we sabotage the very thing we say we want most; and why love, more than almost any other emotion, requires a nervous system that can tolerate it. Together, they unpack five core patterns that get in the way of receiving love, and offer concrete practices for expanding your capacity to give and receive it. Together, they explore: - The stone-faced baby experiments and how attachment becomes attention-seeking - Why "love" in adulthood is often just the attention strategies that worked in childhood - Jealousy as the perfect example of pushing love away while demanding it - Wired together, fired together: how love gets fused with criticism, abuse, or engulfment - Why receiving adoration you don't feel worthy of makes you physically uncomfortable - The identity-level confirmation bias that keeps us seeing rejection over love - How love can dissolve the sense of self and why that's terrifying - Why positive emotions are often harder to feel than negative ones - "Love is a light shined into a dark ocean". Why everything unloved surfaces…

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