Stephen Grosz - ‘Real love is going to hurt’

0:00The husband may be legally married to him with the woman, my patient, but he is properly married to alcohol. Some of the best marriages I've seen are failed marriages. In life, if you love someone, it doesn't end well. It'll either end in divorce or death. Welcome to How to Fail, the podcast that believes failure isn't the ending. It's the beginning of a new kind of understanding. This episode is brought to you by Squarespace, the all-in-one website platform for entrepreneurs to stand out and succeed online. Squarespace is here to support entrepreneurship and help turn your passion into a business.

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2:10Turn your big business idea into with Shopify on your side. Sign up for your£1 per month trial and start selling today at shopify.co.uk slash fail. Go to shopify.co.uk slash fail. Stephen Gross is a practicing psychoanalyst who has worked with patients for more than 45 years. Born in America to immigrant parents who ran a grocery store in Chicago, by the age of 17, he had read Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams and, in his words, was knocked out by it. He went on to study politics and psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, and at Oxford, where he read PPE. His first book, The Examined Life, was published in 2013 and caused a sensation, going straight to number one in the Sunday Times bestseller list.

3:09A book about learning how to live, it was one of the original shelf help titles, and hundreds of thousands of readers, including me, have taken it to their hearts. Now, 12 years on from his debut, Gross returns with Love's Labour, which asks fundamental questions around how to love and be loved in return. Drawing on almost half a century of clinical expertise, Gross shows how love and sex shape ourselves and how our lives and histories shape our relationships. As ever, he communicates the nuance and power of his work by sharing stories which convey the very human vulnerabilities of both patient and analyst.

3:56Because, as he puts it, when we cannot find a way to tell our story, our story tells us. Stephen Gross, welcome to How to Fail. Thank you, Elizabeth. Wonderful introduction, very moving. I'm so thrilled to have you here. I'm thrilled to be here. I'm a huge admirer of yours. And not only are you an exceptional writer and psychoanalyst, You're also so generous, and you turned up with a present for me. And you turned up with a beautiful pen, which is now my favourite writing instrument. So thank you for that as well. You're welcome. But can you talk to us a little bit about an example of how a story might tell us?

4:35Oh gosh, yes. When I think about patience and I think about ways in which people can get caught up, there are things from their childhood which they will not remember. Some people are born into families with a great deal of unhappiness. And throughout their life, they may get a good job, they may get married, but they find ways of spoiling what they have, wrecking the job, wrecking the marriage, wrecking the relationships, and being unhappy. and what you can find sometimes like as an example of a story telling them is that they have an attachment to suffering and the attachments link to that very early beginning where what they learn then becomes familiar to them and it becomes safer and more secure than daring to be happy so they'll find themselves I had someone recently who'd gone through a breakup and said but in an odd way I feel this is normal now being miserable and on my own again it feels sort of and what she was saying was there's something about that which is so familiar which is me which is directing my life.

6:04And we can start talking about, but actually that's one of the problems which is most difficult to change when someone does have an attachment to suffering. But that's an example of where someone's unconscious is directing them. And if we can't get it into a story and start thinking about it, it would be there, say, throughout her entire life. I don't know if that's clear. It's totally clear and it's fascinating. Talk to me a little bit about denial. And so moving on from that idea that unhappiness might be familiar and that therefore shapes the choices we do or don't make. How much does our denial of something that we secretly know to be true, but that we live our life trying to avoid, how much does that shape our story?

6:47I was thinking of denial when you said the word denial, I immediately thought of failure. because I was thinking, I think of you as sort of like the professor of theology. Thank you. Because you talk to people all the time about this. In a way, when someone comes to see me for a consultation, they usually begin with a failure. It's not unlike the podcast. People begin with, my marriage is a failed marriage. My relationship to my parents has failed. I have a terrible relationship to my children or to my body. I overeat. I do this. At work, I do all these destructive things. But the first thing, denial I think of, is I'm listening, as I'm sure you listen and think, where do they place the cause?

7:31And most people, so many people come to my office, I had a man not that long ago tell me about his failed marriage, and I said, tell me, why do you think that is? And of course, in the next 35 minutes, he spoke about his wife, that the cause of the problem was her. It wasn't in him. So there was a denial about seeing himself clearly. A lot of the things in my new book, Love's Labor, are about—it's really a book about trying to see clearly ourselves and our beloveds. That's what it's about, that the aim of life is to see oneself clearly and the world clearly. And denial is a refusal to do that.

8:14it's the insistence that the problem is over there in someone else, not in me. The failure, if I failed, was because of them. And so the first job that I have to do, which is a little bit different than yours, is to kind of see if they can see some of themselves in that failure. Well, I adored your new book, and I adored your first book. And actually, your first book, The Examined Life, came into my life when I was going through a major failure, which is when my first marriage was imploding. And interestingly, I started seeing a new therapist and she said, why are you here? I said, I'm here because I'm doing IVF.

8:54And if it fails, I know I'll need some help with that. And she said, how's your marriage? I was like, it's totally fine. It's absolutely fine. Absolutely a-okay. But of course she was doing a very clever thing, which was identifying if you need to come and see a therapist about IVF, it means you're probably not getting that support from the spouse. And that therapeutic journey became the story of my divorce. And the examined life really helped me through that. Right. Before we get onto your failures, I would love to touch on your own childhood. Yeah. It's a very specific experience, I imagine, being raised by immigrant parents in Chicago, grocery store.

9:34And your father had left Germany, is that right? Yeah. Czechoslovakia. Czechoslovakia. It was Austria-Hungary, it was Czechoslovakia. It's now in the Ukraine, this little village. And yes, a lot of our family was killed in the Holocaust. So he came just before the war, went into the U.S. Army, because people did that to become citizens at the time. And I think it was a very optimistic time. I mean, my mother, and I think they were very happy and felt that life was all in front of them, as so many people did in the States in the 50s and 60s. You've said in the past that when you mentioned the war or when it came up in conversation, you would sort of wander off rather than talk about it.

10:22Well, specifically, I think the Holocaust. I was raised with, for example, a cousin of ours who was in Auschwitz who had a number on her arm who I saw very frequently. and there were members of my family. I went to a Hebrew school, and again, there were lots of Holocaust survivors there

10:47who had a very ambivalent relationship to these American kids. I was born in the 50s, really less than a decade after the war, and they will have seen us and thought we were spoiled. and they had an ambivalent relationship towards, I mean, they were very kind in one way, but they were also depressed and angry. And it created all sorts of psychological problems. That cousin of mine who was a survivor, I think it was very hard. She had been in madness for so long. And I remembered something she told me. She saw a psychoanalyst in Chicago once a week for many years, and she said that he had said to her, you come here once a week to see me, not because you are mad, but because you lived in a mad world, and I'm here to remind you that the feelings that you have are okay, and that's why we meet.

11:46so you know it can be different things but it was um you know on the whole many ways my childhood was you know quite happy with in that how moving do you i'm so aware of doing a sort of cod job of psychoanalysis while speaking to one of the greatest psychoanalysts all time but um do you feel that part of what has drawn you to this line of work is a responsibility to tell stories that otherwise are left untold or snuffed out? Is there that weight? It's very complicated. I think, to be honest, in the new book I mentioned a little bit, one of the things that I discovered, all analysts have to have an analysis.

12:34And one of the things that I discovered in my analysis is that I loved my parents, but I didn't altogether trust them. Part of that was I had a birth defect when I was born. I had to have surgery. And like here, I don't know if you know, but back in the 40s, 50s, 60s, children weren't allowed to be visited by their parents, like at Great Ormond Street or any of the children's hospitals. You could go once a week or on a Sunday afternoon, or often parents were allowed in the evening while the children were sleeping to look through a window. And that's how it was where I was in hospital, too. So it breaks a deep fundamental bond.

13:12It's traumatizing to the child. A lot of my colleagues, too, have had things in their life sent to boarding school or parents who are alcoholic. It's often trying to make sense of—my parents were loving, but I think they thought if we talked about it, it would upset me. So we never talked about. And that is undoubtedly part of why I became an analyst. And I think a lot of my colleagues have things. They're generally curious. They want to know about why their childhood was the way it was, why it was shaped the way it was. Let's take a moment to talk about Bumble, the dating app that believes love in all its forms is the foundation to a happy, healthy life.

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15:26Failing to see what psychoanalysis really is, failing to recognize my own voice, failing to distinguish love from its imitation. These failures brought me embarrassment, unhappiness, and pain. I wouldn't wish them away. Which really is the clarion call of this podcast. Yeah, it is. That's why I like your podcast so much, because it is, you know, sometimes it's interesting. I love watching them. I love listening to them, because you see people trying to pull away from, you're gently taking them towards that. Your first failure is, as you put it, to be a psychoanalyst is to fail every day. Yes. I mean, to me, I believed when I started, and as I said, every analyst has to have their own psychoanalysis.

16:12I thought my analyst was, you know, x-ray vision. He saw everything. He knew everything. You know, when I first went there, of course, what I learned was the exact opposite. that the psychoanalysis is two people not knowing together. We have to figure it out together, and that means both of us will make mistakes, and I will get it wrong. And that's why it's really important to help the patient that the atmosphere is warm, that it's nonjudgment. It's to encourage the patient also to correct me and to come back the next day or their next session and say, you're an idiot. What were you saying yesterday that was completely wrong?

16:53And I welcome that because that has to happen. Otherwise, you can't get on to figuring it out. And it really is a collaborative in that way. By the way, I also think love works like that too in certain ways. It's in love between a parent and a child or a couple or colleagues, friends. You get it wrong each day. But the other person intuits you're trying. and that's where they know the love is. They know that you're trying to see clearly them and yourself and make sense of it. So in a way, being in Alice's, that's just ongoing. There are some times when failure is an important feature and I had a case not that long ago, a young girl who clearly wanted the analysis to fail.

17:49She's very entangled with her mother, eating disorder, wanted, so she wasn't turning up, or when she did turn up, she was silent, or she was aggressive, or, and it took a while to realize that the deal was with her mother would be that I would fail, and that that meant that she, the only person who could fix her was her mother, and that she could stop therapy and just be with the mother. And once we saw that and could start putting words to that, it meant understanding that she was really sad about one of the things we have to do, by the way, when we love, which is to lose things, to let go of the parent to make room for a new relationship.

18:34She did not want to do that. And so we could start talking about it. She could get sad. We could talk about the pain of growing up, and the analysis could go forward, and we could progress. Sometimes, I had an experience not that long ago where a patient wants you to fail. Young people do this, to see, because they're perfectionists, so many young people are, and they want to see how you cope with failure. Do you, oh my, you should get upset, or are you kind of more... accepting of it and thinking realistically, well, I've done the best I can do. They want to see how you manage failure. And sometimes people, by the way, give you an experience of failure because they don't have the words to tell you how bad it feels.

19:25And they want you to feel a failure and know that you're failing and see you fail so they know you've had that experience. I saw someone, an adult not that long ago, whose relationship with their parents was terrible almost from the beginning. And I think the parents were really disturbed, very, very disturbed. And this person made a wonderful life. But one of the things that came out in the analysis was I quite often felt I wasn't getting it. And eventually we arrived at a kind of view that she was giving me an experience of what it was like to be her as a child. she never could get her parents to feel what she was thinking what she wanted what she she just couldn't get through to them and she was giving me an experience of that partly so i could i realized eventually empathize with her and i i said i think you're giving me an experience of what it was like to be you with your parents and she said that's exactly what it was like being with my parents and are there any clients who you feel that you've just had an abject failure with that you haven't helped them in the way that you have striven to do.

20:35Yes. I mean, there are analyses which, absolutely, that will happen. I don't know, maybe I'm kidding myself sometimes, because I also think you never know. One of my teachers, I was doing a child case, a very disturbed child, and I had a wonderful supervisor, distinguished child analyst, and I was saying something, I was in my 30s, I said, The child doesn't hear anything I'm saying. We're not getting anywhere. There's a complete... And he said, you don't know what's going in. You do not know what that child is making use of or not making use of. And some of the happens that comes through, because I've had people where I felt the work was failing.

21:17And analysis will end if the patient breaks it off or you end it for some reason, or the two of you agree, which is hopefully what happens. But sometimes a patient will stop. and I've had a patient abruptly stop and I felt a terrible failure and then six months or a year or two years later they came back um and so you don't know sometimes because sometimes people return and say I got this from it I didn't get this I was very angry at that point in my life and you go on again. As the analyst, do you ever feel angry with a client or judgmental of a client? I do, of course. And it's not that you don't feel those things, but you then think about why you're feeling that thing.

22:08The patient that abruptly leaves wants you to be upset, wants you to be shocked or angry. And you have to think about, huh, why do they want that? And oftentimes it's they're furious with you that you're not giving something or seeing something. And I have to interrogate myself or take my work to a colleague and say, what am I missing? And there's a lot of that in my work. Colleagues come to me with cases, peers. I take my work to other people and we discuss it and try and think through. but it would be odd not to have feelings so if someone comes in and tells me they're boring and I find them incredibly interesting that would be peculiar if they say everyone tells you in my first book there was a case of someone who I did find extraordinarily boring and boredom is different than just being sleepy you're just it was like being drugged And it was kind of interesting because you realize it was, you know, in America we say playing possum, you know, of being dead, of like kind of, I realized that he was doing that as a defense.

23:24Possums literally do that so other animals don't attack them. Uh, he was doing something to make it so I didn't interact with him, that I couldn't get to him. It was his defense. So it's important to register, oh my gosh, and then to interrogate, why am I having this feeling? And make use of that. You also write in Love's Labour about those unspoken, unconscious signals that clients give you. So when they arrive, how they arrive, whether they're a few minutes late, the ballet dancer that you had who synchronized her movements to yours. I'd love you to talk a little bit about that, about what you notice.

24:04Yeah, I mean, I do all sorts of work. So I see some people once a week or twice a week. But a large body of my work is seeing people intensively four or five times a week. That's not for everyone, but it's appropriate for certain people. And some people, the more you see someone, the more you're aware of their habits. So there are people that arrive literally right at the dot of their session, and they come right in. They buzz, I open the door, they come in, and they never have to wait in the waiting room. And there may be reasons for that, that they can't bear. I worked at a forensic clinic, and that's what somebody did.

24:47He came right in one minute after his session started. He came up the stairs to his room, and it turned out one of the things that he did was he would never wait in the queue at supermarkets. He would just steal what he wanted because he couldn't bear queues. So if he had something, he would just walk out with. There's people that the ballet dancer was somebody I just began to notice. No matter how quickly or slowly, I would walk to my chair and sit down. She would move across the room and sit down onto the couch at the same time I sat down into my chair. I don't think she noticed. It wasn't conscious.

25:23You couldn't plan that. The guy who turns up one minute late, or the people who turn up one minute early, or I think I mentioned a patient always closes the door. Another patient would always crack his knuckles before starting. He'd lay on the couch and then do that every day. If you put it in your diary, crack knuckles, you would get it wrong. But just one of the things that's borne in on you when you do the work that I do is the power of the unconscious. The intensity, the vehemence of how our lives are driven in a certain way by things we're not aware of. The ballerina, I think, felt our minds were in sync.

26:06If we could both sit down at that moment, there was a kind of mind meld. I could almost know what she was thinking, and we were closer if we were moving at the same moment together. And she'd had years of that, I mean, since she was a tiny girl doing ballet school. And she just sort of, I think, didn't even think about it as a thing. And one of the stories of my book was about a patient who's always 15 minutes late, and slowly realizing that the missed part of the session actually was in some ways the most important part of the session. That there was quite a narrative about absence. And the story was, in a way, how with that patient, she'd had an older sibling that had died, and that the mother was still quite involved with.

26:54And she came to believe, I think, from birth, that what was not there was more thought about than what was there. and so she always gave me a chunk of each session when she wasn't there because that's when I would be thinking about her and as if I would be thinking about her more when we weren't together so those things can have a powerful impact we don't even realize yes absolutely in our relationships at sierra i discover top workout gear at incredible prices which might lead to another discovery. Your headphones haven't been connected this whole time. Awkward. Discover top brands at unexpectedly low prices.

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29:08So we're in the womb, and we have to give up the womb to have the breast. We give up the breast to have solid food. We give up being at home and the kind of cozy, snuggly thing with mommy and family to go to nursery and reception. And at each stage of our life, at 18, we will leave home to start work or go to university or whatever we're doing. At each stage, we have to let go of something to have the new thing. And if we don't do that, we can't have the new thing. We have to make room for it. some of the stories in the book are about our resistance to that some of them are external, our love of our parents so the second story I think is about a girl who can't send her wedding invitations and she can't understand quite why she can't do that and that's about the anxiety of letting go of her parents I saw someone recently who was in their 70s whose father in his 90s was dying and what was interesting about that was she and her husband were more children of her family than they had never really made a family of their own and the children that they had had were all sort of the children of her parents her attachment to them was paramount and she had never given it up or reduced it in any way to make room for the marriage and her husband and his life and to build a new thing together.

30:48So the example you're bringing about someone who's finding it difficult, it is difficult. It's probably the most difficult thing there is, is accepting that loss. And it can be more complicated. It can be not just letting go of an external thing like our parents too, sometimes we'll be in a marriage, we love our husband or wife, but we see an aspect of ourselves that we refuse to let go of, that we have to let go of if we're really going to have proper intimacy and surrender to our beloved. And if we don't do that, it's not going to happen. And people, again, those are aspects of ourselves sometimes people just refuse to let go of.