The Parts of You That Cannot Love | (#086) Beyond Success: Psychology & Philosophy for Achievers, with David Tian

Every achiever I’ve gotten to know thinks they want deeper connection. Almost none of them understand what it actually costs, so let’s talk about the cost. In this episode, you’re going to see the one move most achievers have been unconsciously refusing to make. It’s a move that changes behind the scenes, how every close relationship in your life works, your oldest friends, the family who raised you, your own family, and the one with yourself, which matters more than all the others put together.

What I’m about to describe isn’t a technique. A technique is a thing you add to the list of things you already do. A reorientation, though, is a different kind of thing altogether. It asks you to stop doing something that you’ve built your whole life around, and if you’ve built a lot of your life around it, as most high-achievers have, then this isn’t a small ask. It will feel at moments like I’m asking you to give up something that you cannot give up. I promise, though, that you can. But I want you to know what you’re walking into. [01:00.0]

Now, nothing in this episode is hard to understand, but everything in it is actually hard to do. So, first, let me tell you why this episode exists in the first place. If you built something substantial, like a career or a company, or a reputation or life that, by most measures, looks good from the outside, then you might have noticed a strange thing happening at the same time—the people that you actually want to be closest to you end up feeling far away.

You can’t reach them the way you want to and you can’t quite account for why. You keep trying to put words around it, but the words keep slipping off. You figure maybe it’s a phase or maybe you’re just tired, or maybe this is just how it is once the creating or building years are behind you, and life goes on, but that feeling never goes away.

Here’s what’s happening. The moves that built your career are the same moves that starve the relationships. You can’t solve a paradox that you can’t see, which is why so many of the people living inside this one never find their way out of it. They try harder at the wrong thing, and then that distance grows. [02:05.4]

So, why did none of us notice this? It’s because the career moves worked. They worked well and they worked for decades, so you kept using them, and without any deliberate decision, you brought them into every other room that you went into. You used them with the people that you’ve known the longest, with the friends that you came up with, with the family that you came from, with the family that you created. You used them on the first dates, too, the ones that went well and the ones that didn’t go anywhere.

They worked so well in one part of your life that it stopped occurring to you to ask whether they worked in any other domain of your life. Nobody teaches you to ask that question and nothing in the life you built gives you any reason to—but I want you to sit with this question for a moment. If you get this wrong for yet another decade, you will arrive at the end of your life surrounded by people that you never actually let in, and without the family that you always thought you would eventually build. [03:01.8]

Who is that man? What has he done with those years? What does he tell himself at 70 years old about the partner he never met, the children he never had, the friends who stayed close by and never quite understood him or got to know him deeply?

He knows the answer already. He knows it at night when the apartment is quiet and there’s nothing left to read. The question sits there in his mind, but he pushes it away. He keeps pushing it away, because there are things to do in the morning. This is a specific kind of loneliness. It’s the loneliness of being admired by people who don’t really know you, and the question I want you to carry into the rest of this episode is whether that future has already started showing up in your life today. 

First, I want to clear away three myths that you probably already subscribed to at some level about connection. If you keep subscribing to them, if you keep believing in them, then nothing I say after this is going to do you any good. [03:57.1]

Here’s the first one, real quick. You believe connection is about finding the right person—but it isn’t. Connection is about becoming capable of opening up fully with someone and having that person feel seen, heard and safe enough to open up with you. The work is not in the search, per se. The work is, first and foremost, in your capacity.

Here’s the second myth. Maybe you believe connection is a communication skills problem. If you just learned the right things to say, if you just asked the right questions, if you just listened better, then the closeness would necessarily follow—but it doesn’t. Skills are merely the surface. The problem is what’s going on underneath the surface.

Here’s the third myth. Maybe you believe that more vulnerability equals more intimacy. You’ve read the books. You’ve done the practiced disclosure—but it all hasn’t worked. Performed vulnerability is simply another form of optimization, and your intimate partner will feel the difference before you’ve even said your piece. [04:56.5]

Let me say where this leaves us. The problem isn’t what you’re doing on the outside, per se. It’s what you’re thinking and feeling on the inside. I first heard this from Tony Robbins and it’s a great way of putting this truth—a relationship is where you go to give, not to get. If you’re like most of the achievers I’ve worked with, you entered your last relationship, and really every close relationship and most of your family interactions, carrying a hidden ledger in your head.

You never sat down and decided to start tracking what you were getting from the people in your life, but the ledger was there anyway. You’re asking yourself, “What am I getting from this? Is this worth my time? Is this person adding to my life?”

Now, it’s important to realize the ledger is invisible to the person who’s keeping it, not because he’s stupid or anything, because obviously he’s not, but because the ledger mirrors how every other domain of his life works. It’s how he built the company. It’s how he built the assets. It’s how he chose his friends, his hires, his deals. It’s not a bug in his thinking. It’s actually a major feature. It’s one of the main factors that made him successful, and that’s why he can’t see it operating in his intimate life, because it hasn’t yet visibly failed him anywhere else. [06:08.8]

So, what is it then? I think intimacy starts with a feeling. Something pulls you toward her instead of toward some other person. There’s no argument behind that pull, no balance sheet, no list of reasons. The pull is closer to a recognition than a calculation. That feeling is what gets the whole project going, that you like her and she stands out to you, but the feeling is not what holds it together.

What holds it together is what you choose to do with that feeling, whether you lean in, whether you let it grow, whether you follow through year after year as the feeling thins and thickens and thins again. It’s not a feeling. It’s a choice, and out of that choice, over time, she becomes irreplaceable to you. We’re talking about a true relationship, a truly intimate relationship. [06:57.2]

If a perfect clone of her walked through the door tomorrow, every quality matched, every memory replicated, and assuming the original is still out here in the world, you would not accept that trade for the perfect clone. You would know the difference. It’s her you love, not the list of her properties. She has worth in herself, simply because she is who she is.

There’s an old echo here in the Divine Name of God in the Hebrew Bible, “I Am Who I Am,” the irreducible thereness of a person, the intrinsic nature of the person, which is the only basis that real love can finally rest on. This is what the philosopher Iris Murdoch was pointing at when she said love requires attention, the slow, patient, unglamorous practice of seeing the person in front of you, not the woman you wish she were, but her as she actually is. [07:50.7]

Murdoch thought most people never see the other human being clearly enough to actually love them. They spend their whole lives in love with their own ideas about other people, which means love is not merely something that you find. It’s something that you choose to do. This is about true intimacy. This is as true of your spouse as it is of your own child. You would never accept a clone of them when the original is there, even if they share all the other properties in common—so, this is an unconditional valuing of the intrinsic worth of that unique person.

But the ledger that you keep in your head promises you safety. You think, If I measure, then nobody will take advantage of me. If I keep score, then I will stay in control. But the tabulating is the thing itself that keeps authentic intimacy from forming. You can’t calculate your way into love, not real love.

If real love has to be earned by your performance, then that’s not love. It’s more like a salary. If love can be withdrawn when you stop meeting certain conditions, then that’s not love. That’s like a contract. If you only love her because she loves you back, that’s not love either. That’s just a trade, and a trade is exactly the thing the ledger was designed to manage. That’s why you’ve got that ledger. [09:11.4]

This isn’t meant to be some kind of moralism. I’m not saying the ledger is bad, as if ledgers are intrinsically bad. I’m saying it’s incompatible with the thing that you really want and claim that you want. This is just mechanics. Intimacy has a specific requirement, but the ledger violates that requirement. You cannot keep one and have the other, which means that most of the achievers listening have never actually known true intimacy or love.

They’ve had relationships. Maybe some of those have even been long. Maybe they’ve even had people in their lives who actually did love them, but they have not consciously known the thing undergirding all of that, because they were keeping score the whole time, and worse, they wouldn’t know where to find true intimacy, or they wouldn’t recognize it, even if they did happen upon it, and they wouldn’t know how to generate it in themselves. [10:04.0]

Intimacy does not survive a ledger. It dies when both people start optimizing each other, using each other, treating the other as an instrument to get something else they want. If the alternative to the ledger is not another better calculation, then what is it? The ancient Confucians had a word for it 2,500 years ago. The word was ren. It often gets translated into English as humaneness or fellow feeling, or compassion.

The modern ear might hear compassion and think of softness or sentimentality, the opposite of what built your career, but the full Confucian meaning of that word was something else. Compassion is the capacity to enter deeply into what another person is feeling, and in the same moment, to have the desire to alleviate that person’s pain, but have the discipline to resist rushing in to fix it. [10:57.2]

That third part of the definition is where almost every high-achiever fails. It’s not because he doesn’t care. He cares enormously. The problem is that his entire life has trained him to do the opposite of what compassion requires. When you truly love someone and they’re in pain, sitting with that pain with them without trying to solve it for them is harder than any deal you’ve closed, and it’s harder for a specific reason that has everything to do with how you got here in the first place.

Your instinct when a problem appears is to move decisively. You see it. You assess it, and then you act. That instinct is probably what helped you get your success. It’s what helped you get your company or the bank balance, or the reputation, and it works perfectly in all of these other areas of accomplishment, but it doesn’t work in the one that we are focusing on here. In an intimate relationship, that instinct is the problem itself.

Picture this. The woman that you love comes to you in pain. Maybe she lost a parent or her best friend said something really cruel, or she’s having one of those evenings where the weight of everything sits on her chest and she can’t really articulate why, and you, because you love her, reach immediately for a five-point plan. [12:07.1]

You ask diagnostic questions. You suggest reframes. You point out the silver lining that she may never have considered. You think you are helping. What you call helping is actually you escaping. The solving lets you avoid feeling what she is actually feeling. It is motion as escape, and you’re mistaking being in motion for being with her.

There’s a long tradition in this of confusing activity with true engagement, of confusing the appearance of involvement with the substance of it. What she actually needs in this example is the discipline that you don’t yet have, the discipline of staying with her while not trying to fix it or not analyzing it, not strategizing about it, but instead staying with her in that space with what she is going through, without having to make it different or to fix it for her, or to solve it for her or to please her. [13:02.1]

Sometimes, the real problem isn’t more effort or more motivation. It’s knowing the right direction. A lot of people listening to this podcast are capable and driven. Things still look fine on paper, but life still feels strangely flat. When that happens, more advice usually isn’t the answer. Clarity is.

I’ve put together a short assessment that takes about two minutes. It’s simply a way to see which area deserves your attention most right now, whether that’s relationships, decision-making, or how pressure is being handled day to day. Based on your responses, you’ll be sent a short set of master classes related to that area.

If that sounds useful, you can find it at DTPhD.com/quiz. That’s “dtphd.com/quiz.”

This is what takes more courage than probably any deal that you’ve closed. Holding that space asks you to tolerate the one thing the deal-maker in you can’t tolerate. It asks you to be in a place where you have no certainty, no plan, and very little control over how this ends. [14:07.2]

What kind of person has never learned how to do this? There’s a reason he can’t do it, a reason deeper than mere habit, and that reason has to do with something that happened to you a long time ago, before you were old enough to know it was happening. You carry a young part of yourself that learned very early on that love and intimacy and deep connection were conditional on your performance.

You couldn’t have put it into words back then. Children don’t have the words for this, but that lesson sank in anyway, maybe before you could even read. That part of you didn’t go anywhere. It’s still there locked in a maladaptive pattern in your brain. It’s operating the background of every adult relationship you have, in the way you speak to a woman that you really like that you’re dating, or in the way you tense up when you pick up a call from your mom, or in the way you change the subject when an old friend says something that gets a little too close to a sore spot, or in the way you end a date five minutes earlier than you meant to and can’t quite say why. [15:08.2]

Picture the boy you were at six or seven or eight. You figured out fairly quickly which version of yourself would get approval. Maybe the smart one, maybe the funny one, maybe the helpful one, or that brave one, or the boy who never cried, no matter what. Whichever version of you it was, you became that version.

You became it so completely that by the time you were 18, you could no longer remember being any other way, and the other more vulnerable parts of you—the angry boy, the upset boy, the needy boy, the sad boy, the small boy, the boy who was scared—those parts learned that being themselves was dangerous, so they went underground or they were forced underground. They got sent away. So, the useful version of you could be the only one anyone in the outside world ever saw. [15:57.8]

In Internal Family Systems therapy, IFS therapy, the word for those types of parts is exile. The word isn’t just a metaphor. The boy was actually sent out of the family of selves that were allowed to show up in the outer world, and until you welcome those exiled parts of you back—not analyzing them, not optimizing them, not fixing them, but welcoming them—then every relationship you build as an adult is going to have a false floor under it.

You may already know the feeling of a false floor without having a word for it. From the outside, the relationship looks solid. The career looks good. Your partner seems fine. The friendships are all in place. The life looks like it’s working, but standing inside it, something feels unstable. The ground keeps tilting in ways that you can’t quite account for. You keep assuming something is wrong with your partner or your job or the city you live in, something outside yourself. You swap these things out one by one, but the instability keeps following you. [17:01.4]

So, look, you can find the right partner. You can learn the right communication skills. You can do all the right things, but it will still feel hollow. That emptiness is not coming from the relationship. It’s coming from the fact that you’re showing up to the relationship from inside a system that never let the exiled boy sit down at the table. All the useful parts of you are at the table, the achiever or the strategist, or the provider, all of those, but the little boy who was sent away is not. So, if love ever does arrive at the table, it arrives at a table where the parts of you that need it the most are not allowed to take a seat.

There’s a moral consequence to all this. You cannot offer another person what you have refused to offer yourself, not truly, not fully. The compassion that you refuse to give the inner boy that you were, the boy that you’ve spent 30 years treating as an embarrassment or a weakness, a shameful thing, a thing to grow out of, is the same compassion that you will never be able to give the partner you eventually meet or the child you hope to raise, or the friend who is already sitting across from you, waiting to be actually seen. [18:13.6]

Worse than that, you will pass your inner burden on to the people closest to you. They’ll carry what you would not carry. This is what happens when an achiever doesn’t do this work. The ones he loves the most end up paying the cost—which brings us to what courage actually looks like.

Courage, in this context, is not what you probably think it is. You’ve spent a lifetime equating courage with bold action, making the bet, taking the meeting, going first. None of that is what we’re actually talking about here. In the context of intimacy, courage looks like these three things, none of which look like courage from the outside. [18:51.3]

The first is staying in the uncomfortable conversation with someone that you care about when every instinct in you is to flee, freeze, fight, or fawn. The old reflexes light up. The instinct is to leave, physically, emotionally, by joke, by argument, by changing the subject, by making the other person wrong, by going small and agreeable. Courage is staying anyway, standing or sitting still, letting the discomfort be in the room with you, instead of doing whatever you’ve always done to make it stop.

The second is saying the true thing instead of the expedient thing. The expedient thing keeps the temperature low and the relationship convenient, but the true thing risks the whole arrangement, right? Courage is choosing the true thing, knowing she might not respond the way you hope, and knowing you might have to live with what you said honestly.

The third is letting someone see the parts of you that did not build the career, the parts of you that you have hidden so well you almost forgot they were there, the boy who was sent away, the grief you never let yourself feel fully, or the fear that you have buried under 20 years of competence. Nobody at work has ever met that version of you or those versions of you. Courage is letting her see him. [20:11.5]

It is the exiled parts of you that most need, the intimacy, the love, the connection that these achiever parts in you are unknowingly blocking. The parts of you that built the company cannot receive what your soul has been asking for all along. The parts of you that can are the ones that you locked away when you were eight.

The cruelest joke in all of this is that the career building parts of you are the ones that get all the praise. The world rewards them constantly, so you keep feeding those parts of you that are actually afraid of the openness that intimacy requires and starving the parts of you that need that intimacy the most. [20:53.0]

Let me show you what this looks like when a man actually chooses to do this. Now, let’s call him James. He was 41 when we started working together. He had sold his company about a year earlier. He was single then. He’d wanted to start his own family for years, but the years kept passing, and then he never got serious about it until then.

His outer life looked great, eight figures in liquid assets, a two-story condo in a major global city, friends from his university days that he still saw on weekends and partied with. He got first dates pretty easily and had several short-term relationships that lasted a few months, none of them going further than that, though.

He came in focused on one thing: “Tell me how to find the right woman.” He was direct about it. He’d built a company by figuring out what worked and doing more of that, and he assumed dating would yield to the same approach. What the first months of our work together looked like was exactly that. He attacked the problem the way he attacked every other problem in his life up until then. He optimized his dating profile. He A/B tested everything. He kept a spreadsheet, an actual spreadsheet of women that he was talking to and where each conversation stood. [21:58.4]

He went on plenty of dates. He got into two short relationships while we were working at the beginning and both of those ended the same way. The woman would say something like, “I don’t feel like I really know you and I don’t know how to get through to you,” and he would have no idea what she was talking about. He came back from one of these endings totally confused. He’d done everything he thought he was supposed to do. He’d asked the better questions at dinner. He had made the thoughtful gestures. He had been, by his own honest estimation, an attentive partner, but it hadn’t worked.

The turn for him came in a session where we weren’t even talking about dating. We were talking about his mom. His mother had been a brilliant, accomplished woman who praised competence, but went absent whenever James was upset as a little boy. He told me almost as a throwaway, “I figured out pretty early on which version of me my mother liked,” and then silence. Neither of us spoke for what felt like a long while, and then it dawned on him, he had spent 40 years being the version of himself that his mother had approved of. [23:06.4]

Every woman that he had ever dated had been on a first date with that same version of him. None of them had ever met the boy that version had been hiding. The grief that came next wasn’t a performance, but instead something he’d been carrying since he was a boy, this man in his early-40s finally meeting the boy that he had sent away.

What changed in the months after wasn’t what he expected. He stopped optimizing dates and started, clumsily at first, just being himself in them. He sat in conversations that he would normally have tried to steer. He said the true thing instead of what would have made him look good. He let women see the parts of him that didn’t lead to any of his outer success. [23:50.8]

A few months later, he started seeing someone that he had met through a friend, and they’re still together now over a year later. A few months into that relationship, he asked her at one point what had made her want to keep seeing him after their first few dates. What she said to him was, “I asked you a question and you sat there thinking about it. You just sat there thinking about it for a long time. You didn’t try to fill the silence. I could tell that you were actually thinking about what I’d said, and it was the first time in a long time that I’d been on a date and didn’t feel like the guy was just trying to say stuff to impress me.”

The detail that matters is this. James didn’t become a different man. Instead, he welcomed back the inner boy that he had sent away at seven years old, and the man that boy had grown up to become, the one now capable of letting another person see him deeply, finally took his seat fully at the table.

So, let me bring all of this back together before we close. We started with a question about what connection actually requires and we’ve walked through four pieces of the answer. [24:55.5]

The first was the ledger. Most high-achievers enter every relationship keeping silent score, and intimacy cannot survive that scoring. It dies the moment two people start using each other instrumentally.

Then we talked about compassion as discipline, the practice of feeling what another person feels, and staying in that space with them instead of solving their pain to escape your own discomfort with it.

Third, we looked at the exile, the young parts of you that were sent away when you learned that love had to be earned. Until those parts are welcomed back, every relationship you build will have a false floor under it.

We reframed courage, not as some kind of bold action, but as staying in a conversation that you would normally flee, saying the honest, true thing, and letting someone see the parts of you that didn’t build the outer career. [25:45.3]

You know what parts of yourself got sent away you’ve known for a long time? You can probably point to the moment or the year, or the sequence of years when those parts learned to go underground. You’ve built an entire life that requires them to stay hidden, a career, a persona, a way of carrying yourself when you walk into an important room, and you’re wondering why the people closest to you feel so far away. This is the cost of that arrangement, not a cost that you’ll pay someday, but a cost you’re paying right now in the relationships that you’re actually in. [26:18.5]

Now, picture for a moment the version of you who can sit still in a hard conversation without bolting or freezing, or going blank. You can say the true, honest thing instead of just what makes you look good, and you can let those closest to you see the parts of you that didn’t build that career.

That man has access to a kind of love that most high-achievers never touch in their entire lives, not because they didn’t deserve it, of course, but because nobody ever taught them what’s required, and they never learned, but you’re learning now.

Thank you so much for listening. If this has helped you in any way, please share it with anyone else that you think could benefit from it. Thank you so much again. I look forward to welcoming you to the next episode. Until then, David Tian, signing out. [26:58.3]