Truer Love Stories

How do you communicate comfortably about sex in a culture that's more used to “doing it" than talking about it? In this month's episode of Truer Love Stories, our gracious guest invites us to learn from some of her most vulnerable concerns when it comes to having sex with partners who she's not in a monogamous relationship with. Listen and learn how to stay secure while being physically intimate with someone new.

Do you find yourself getting obsessed over crushes or maybe even falling in love with people who you barely know? If so, this month’s episode is for you! Learn what’s really going on when you have a crush as you listen to our guest sort through her feelings around a guy she can’t stop thinking about - he’s even showing up in her dreams! Is this the universe’s way of telling her they’re meant to be, or is something else going on here? Join us and listen to find out!

How much does attraction play a role in who you date? And what actually makes you attracted to one person over another? In this episode, Love Guide & Attachment Coach Taryn Newton-Gill explores attraction from an attachment perspective, drawing on her own love life and those of her dating and matchmaking clients to help you consider if high or unrealistic expectations around attraction is getting in the way of you creating secure and lasting love.

In this episode, Love Guide + Attachment Coach Taryn Newton-Gill coaches an avoidantly attached woman struggling to decide if she should move in with her boyfriend, who has just purchased a home suitable for a family. While she loves her boyfriend, she is unsure if marriage and kids is really what she wants, or if she's just moving in because she's used to going with the flow and letting life and circumstances make decisions for her. Taryn talks her through why her avoidant tendencies are likely at the root of this major life decision and how getting clearer on her unique needs will help her determine which path is truly best for her. This conversation is eye-opening in understanding what is truly going on in avoidant person's mind and body, so if you're someone who identifies with avoidant attachment or love someone who is avoidantly attached, this episode is for you!

In this special anniversary episode, Taryn chats with a longtime client of hers about her journey from being dependent and unsatisfied in an anxious-avoidant relationship to being empowered and happy in a new, secure relationship. The highlights from this conversation include learning to love yourself and be in your own company, becoming a confident dater, and tips for communicating effectively in an intimate partnership. 

Have you ever felt like dating is hard? After taking my workshop, The One Rule, where I shared that my only rule for creating lasting love was to ask yourself, “Am I comfortable with this?” every step of the way, my guest this month was a little confused. “Aren't you supposed to be uncomfortable in relationships sometimes?” she asked me. “Isn't that just part of it?" Yes…and no. There's a difference between healthy, short-term discomfort and chronic, long-term discomfort. My coaching process, (which includes asking yourself this question about comfort), is how you can determine the difference, and we discuss it in depth over the course of this episode. Ultimately, following your comfort is the key to a happy relationship, so if you feel stuck in an unsatisfying relationship or like you're continuously in relationships that don't go anywhere, this episode is for you!

*For more information on Attachment Theory and the 4 attachment styles mentioned in this episode, visit www.truerlove.com

Have you ever looked at your body and felt anger, sadness, or shame? Chances are, if you're a woman living in America (or perhaps the world at all) you've had these feelings before. What's more is that my guest on this month's Truer Love Stories episode, Embracing Our Bodies, actually defines self-love by how she feels about herself in relation to her body. 

Despite having respect for and appreciating her personality, her intelligence, her capabilities, and more, what defined her sense of love for herself is how she felt about her body. If this doesn't express the deep, psychological impact that constant objectification has on our feelings of self-worth, I don't know what does.

So how do we modern women learn to love ourselves fully when all the messaging we've ever received is to look to our bodies to define our worth, and to reject ourselves if our bodies aren't perfect?

This is the heart of the discussion my guest and I have this month in Embracing Our Bodies, and I think it's such an important one.

Because how we relate to and feel about ourselves has everything to do with how we relate to and feel about our partner.

Our comfortability with our bodies and our insecurities in general directly effects how we show up in our intimate relationships, especially the ones where physical connection plays an important role.

I do my best to provide my guest with some tangible tools for embracing her body and loving her full self, and I'm hoping that if you can relate to her, they land with you, too.

Have you ever questioned your ability to pick a partner that is good for you? Or if you could trust yourself to set appropriate boundaries, or even know what an appropriate boundary looks like? This is the case for our guest this episode, as she shares her difficulty trusting her own discernment around knowing what is acceptable behavior from a romantic partner and when it's time to set a boundary. Listen as Love Guide & Attachment Coach Taryn Newton-Gill walks her through how to increase her sense of confidence and self worth so that she can trust herself not to give all her power away to someone has yet to show they can be trusted with it. 

REFERENCES: 

Brene Brown's video, The Anatomy of Trust, from Oprah's Super Soul Sessions, available on YouTube. 

Book a Clarity Call with Taryn at www.truerlove.com or on Instagram @_truerlove_.

Our guest this episode shares her extreme discomfort around bringing up her honest feelings in intimate relationships, which is a result of her history of being anxiously attached. Now, this can be a huge raw spot for any of us who have insecure attachment styles, as our insecurity comes from a fear of being vulnerable. We’ve somehow received the messaging that it’s not safe to be vulnerable, and so we hide our feelings and live in our heads, trying to work things out on our own, instead of bringing things up. But bringing things up can be so healing when it’s with the right person, and it's what helps us create relationships that are rooted in security, where both partners are regularly getting their needs met (HINT: This is the key to lasting relationships!). PLUS, it’s a great way to figure out if someone’s the right person, so you don’t waste your precious time and energy being attached to someone who isn’t aligned with you. 

We cover a lot in this episode from knowing when to move on from someone who isn’t right for you, to taking our partners off of those way to high pedestals that we put them on, to trust, to going on our very own Eat, Pray, Love journeys, and of course, to how to integrate your attachment style  into your life so that it can help you create more secure relationships. 

To take our Attachment Quiz, go to www.truerlove.com and get the quiz instantly delivered to your email, or book a Free 45 minute Clarity Call to talk to Taryn one-on-one about whatever love questions you may have. 

How do we build connection when we've experienced emotional and physical trauma? Very, very slowly. That's what we learn in this week's episode as our guest shares her past experience of sexual abuse by people whom she had trusted and called friends. This, paired with past familial trauma, is making it challenging for her to feel safe connecting physically with her current partner. Listen as we talk through what it takes to build trust after trauma, which includes understanding the nature of trust, relational power dynamics, love languages, and more. 

REFLECTION EPISODE: In my last Truer Love Stories Episode, Fixing People Who Don't Meet Your Needs, I talked with a guest who had a pattern of staying with people for longer than her intuition knew was right for, stuck in her most current relationship with a small hope that his “potential” would eventually meet her reality. Her story is similar to ones I hear all the time – women sacrificing their needs for the sake of a relationship. But all this leads to is getting stuck in relationships that reinforce feelings of low self-worth and keep us from being with someone who will support our highest self. It's what makes us waste our time and/or settle because we don't truly believe someone better for us is out there. Since recording this episode with her, I had some more thoughts on how where this pattern of staying in relationships past their expiration comes from and how to get out of that cycle using your own intuition. This episode is those reflections where I take you through a relationship trigger of my own and how I used my intuition to choose a path of higher worth. As I say in the episode, your intuition is rooting for you and knows your worth, it's just a matter of knowing how to listen to it.

Episode mentions: 

Free Session with me; book at www.truerlove.com

Caroline Myss

To Be Magnetic - Lacy Phillips

Do you find yourself regularly wanting to "fix" or change the people that you're dating? You know, the ones you could see yourself being with "for real" -- they have so much "potential" -- except something always just seems to be missing? 

This is the case for our guest this episode, who repeatedly finds herself in relationships with people she calls "fixer-uppers" -- people who seem almost perfect for her, except that they aren't showing her that they're quite ready for a "real" relationship. 

If her story sounds at all familiar to you, you'll have a lot to gain from this episode, as we discuss how having an anxious attachment style leads to us settling for and staying in relationships that are past their expiration date, and why trying to "fix" the other person (or yourself) is actually a response to your needs not being fully met. 

Show notes: 

Quiz: What's Your Relationship Attachment Style? https://view.flodesk.com/pages/5fc856fff10e2d3a22974fbc

The Artist's Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity, by Julia Cameron

www.truerlove.com

In a world that idealizes both romantic love and living as an independent woman, it's easy to find yourself stuck between these two black and white extremes. Our guest this month has found herself at this very crossroads; protective of the loving relationship she's carefully crafted for herself over the years while also longing to eventually build a life with a partner who she connects deeply with. Using a wide array of perspectives including social conditioning, Jungian Archetypes, and of course, Attachment Theory, Love Guide + Women's Empowerment Coach Taryn Newton-Gill helps our guest break down her black and white thinking into smaller shades of gray so that she can learn to balance and integrate her co-existing identities as both a strong, independent woman and a loving partner. To learn your own attachment style or take Truer Love's Conscious Communication Mini Course mentioned in the episode, please visit www.truerlove.com

Have you ever wondered why you seem to attract unavailable people? And no matter how much you're aware of this pattern, you can't help but find yourself in it time and time again, wondering if people who want a relationship actually exist? Maybe people around you have even noticed, and can't understand why you can't just find a nice person who treats you the way you deserve to be treated. Well know this now: nothing is wrong with you if you answered yes to any of these questions! This is an unbelievably common and infuriating pattern, and there's often a reason behind it: likely you’re caught in what’s often known as the Anxious-Avoidant loop, a common dynamic created by people with Anxious (or Fearful Avoidant) attachment styles and Avoidant attachment styles being attracted to each other and then emotionally triggering each other in a repetitive loop until the relationship eventually implodes or fades out. This pattern, which is a result of behavioral science, gets disguised as common myths such as "you have to play the game," "let them chase you," "don't make yourself too available," "they'll figure it out someday" and even gender stereotypes like "men are non-committal" We bust all these myths and more as we talk about what this loop has to do with sex, self-worth, + trust in this month’s powerful episode. To get to know your own attachment style, take our quiz at www.truerlove.com.

In this episode, our guest shares her journey going from total fear of communicating her needs to learning how to connect more authentically in her most important relationships. She openly takes us through her internal process of how the anticipation of rejection or hurting someone's feelings affects her mind, body, and soul, and what tools have helped her get past those fears and gain more confidence around speaking her truth. Understanding where our fear comes from is key to getting past it, so this discussion covers what impacts our ability to communicate, from our dynamic with our parents, to our attachment style, to our relationship expectations, cultural identities, self-judgement, and more. We also talk about new ways of approaching communication, and what you can do to help communication become more second-nature so it can serve you across all of your relationships. 

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES mentioned in this podcast can be found in the link in my Instagram bio @_truerlove_.

Quiz: What's Your Relationship Attachment Style? 

25 Prompts for Setting Boundaries With Kindness

Effective Communication Prompts - Ways to Communicate When Dating Someone New

How do we let go of a person who isn't right for us, but who we love deeply? Love Guide + Women's Empowerment Coach, Taryn Newton-Gill, helps a guest navigate her grief around a recent breakup. Using the framework of Attachment Theory, Taryn sheds light on the common attachment issue that's making letting go of her ex so painful, and provides her with holistic tools for moving through her pain so that she can eventually move on to a relationship that's more aligned with who she is and what she truly wants. If you're in the midst of working through your own process of letting go, sign up for Truer Love's workshop, Moving Through Grief, led by spirit worker Sarah Dwyer from The Wonderment Society (link in Instagram bio @_truerlove_) and download my playlist, Healing Heartbreak, (link in Instagram bio @_truerlove_). And if you like today's episode, please make sure to subscribe to this podcast + sign up for the Truer Love Newsletter (also in my Insta bio!)