9 Harsh Truths About How Relationships Work - Jillian Turecki - #893

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
It begins with you. They do not have the power, we do. All the disappointment, confusion, and drama of your former relationships can be traced to the universal fear that you are not enough.

**Jillian Turecki** (0:11)
Yes. Everything that you do inside of a relationship that you are really confused about, that's been maddening to you and to your former partners, or anything that you are questioning, it can be boiled down to the fact that you are afraid that you're not enough for this person, and if you're not enough, that somehow love is going to be taken away from you.
Because when we are confronted with that insecurity, that we are not good enough in some way, that's when we start to act out all our weirdness inside of a relationship, honestly. And yes, of course, there's childhood, there's conditioning, there's your parents, all these things are influences. But when people are angry, they're afraid. When people are lashing out, they're afraid. When people are clinging, they're afraid. When people are shutting down, they are afraid. And I started the book and named it It Begins With You because no one is going to stand in your way more than you. No one is going to lie to you more than you do to yourself. Same for me, this is just everyone. And it's not about you're the only person to blame. It's not about blame at all. But if we want to change our relationship lives, if we want to change our lives at all, we have to be able to look within and see the ways in which our insecurity gets in the way of a relationship. And we have to see where are also not just our insecurity, but our belief system and our conditioning and the things that happened in childhood. We are the common denominator in all our relationships. That's actually really good news because it means that you can actually change something. This concept is the problem is you. Not necessarily. The problem could very well be the people who you're choosing, but you're choosing them. So you're choosing them. Why? And so the first principle, the first truth is you have to be willing to look within. And a lot of people are not willing to do that until they are desperate, but it's the only way.

**Chris Williamson** (2:49)
It's interesting the not enough thing that it makes love and attachment and care feel contingent. It feels like if I could be more, if I was able to be dot, dot, dot. And if you listen to a lot of the discussions on the internet, around romance, but also around friendships and stuff like that, a lot of the time, it's a hopeful and motivating message to say, pick yourself up by your bootstraps, outgrow the person that hurt you, make yourself better, take this curse and turn it into a lesson instead of a blessing that it could have been but it wasn't, so now you're going to alchemize yourself into some better version of you. All of that's fine, but the subtext of a lot of that conversation is still you're not worthy as you are and there's this place that you need to get yourself to or could get yourself to and if only you were there, maybe you wouldn't have been rejected by this person, maybe you would have been able to fulfill their desires to the point where they would have actually been happy with you as you did.

**Jillian Turecki** (3:57)
Yes, and that's a losing strategy. If you're reflecting on past relationships that didn't work, the best thing to do is just to let go and to surrender to the fact that life is about making mistakes and sometimes epic mistakes.
If you've got someone smart whispering in your ear telling you to take a look at this and see what you can learn from it so that you don't repeat it, that's the best case scenario. Some things just don't work out because it wasn't right. Some things don't work out. Some relationships don't work out because you both were too immature to make it work out. Sometimes it doesn't work out because, I don't know, like it wasn't supposed to. You were supposed to learn something. It was supposed to be an experience. Maybe it was supposed to be a love affair instead of it being a marriage. But this is the thing, romantic relationships are where we feel most vulnerable.

**Chris Williamson** (5:05)
There's two worlds where I think your inner patterns show up in a very unique way. The first one is in relationships and the second one is in business.

**Jillian Turecki** (5:16)
Always, yes.