MARK GROVES

WHY YOU CAN’T JUST

"GET OVER IT" — AND
WHAT TO REALLY DO
JEFF HAYS FILMS 2022
MEET MARK GROVES
From https://markgroves.com/:

Hi, I’m Mark. I’m a Human Connection

Specialist and founder of Create The Love.

In other words…I’m a speaker, writer,

motivator, creator and collaborator.
I’m a bridge between the academic and
the human, inviting people to explore the
good, bad, downright ugly, and beautiful
sides of connection. All. The. Things. I'm an
emotional translator, empowering people
to give words to their feelings, step into
courage, and create a life + love they’ll look back on with a resounding
“f*ck yes.”

Most of all, I’m a human being. I just happen to say most of the things
that people tend to keep to themselves.

So, who is Mark Groves?

It’s a question I’ve asked myself plenty of times, and it just might be
the one you’re asking yourself now. I’ve been the awkward kid, the
pretty boy, the brokenhearted guy, the womanizer, the corporate
ladder climber, the white picket fence chaser, the partier, the
intellectual, and now… I am me.

Rock bottoms are chances to meet ourselves, to touch the depths of

who we truly are, buried deeply below who we were taught to be in
order to be loved and “successful.” I don’t know about you, but I don’t
want to live behind masks. I want to live and love all out, and leave
this life with no regrets. The journey to ‘Me’’ didn’t come easily, freely
or simply, but it’s been one hell of a beautiful ride.
INTRODUCTION
“You get to these moments that you're taught to want. And as soon as
I proposed, there was a part of me that thought, I think I'm supposed
to be more excited than this.”

When you meet “the one,” you are about to embark on life’s greatest
adventure and happiness. This is romance at its best, and nothing
could be more perfect… or could it?

Have you ever gone into a relationship expecting a happy ending, only
to feel disappointed? Maybe you feel like you’re faking your way
through it, and everything you’ve been told is the perfect script feels
more like you’re faking it and waiting for the enchantment to kick in.

Maybe you’ve questioned the whole premise of romance that’s been

fed to you your entire life but were afraid to question the narrative.
Mark Groves is not afraid to ask questions, and in this fascinating
interview, he may just turn everything you’ve ever believed about
relationships on its head.

When you remove the idea of “the one” and the prescripted narrative
about what romance should be and look at it all through a new lens,
things really start to make sense.

Mark presents a path to more authentic relationships, ones that

welcome and encourage growth and self-expression. He believes that
cultivating meaningful and fulfilling relationships is a skill-set that
anyone can learn, and he wants you to experience the freedom and
liberation that comes from approaching them with that mindset.

So how does this all tie in with anxiety and depression? Glad you
asked, because Mark addresses that as well in his captivating,
exclusive interview with Jeff Hays for the Anxiety & Depression
docuseries.
THE INTERVIEW
Mark Groves: The birth of my work was really personally driven. It was
from my own relational challenges. I was engaged in my late 20s and I
think a lot of people I was taught get married by a certain age. For me,
that was around 27, have kids by around that time, maybe 30, be a
good provider. That was a message I was sent as a man.

When I got engaged to a really wonderful woman, I was quite anxious

about getting engaged before we did. I sort of think of it, like you get
to these moments that you're taught to want. And as soon as I
proposed, there was a part of me that thought, I think I'm supposed to
be more excited than this.

Feeling like you're taught to want these moments and then you
realize maybe you didn't want them, they're not authentic to actually
your experience or they’re a goal or sometimes a deadline in life
where they feel like one.

And it was that moment that I really wanted to discover: is this person
the one for me? How do I even know that? Why am I so good at talking
about anything but my feelings? I was in sales at the time and I was
quite successful at it.
 So I started to study romantic
relationships. I wanted to, I ended
the engagement three months
after and I was angry. I felt I'd been
lied to about love and
relationships. I felt like Disney. And
for me, Catholicism had misled me
and that I wasn't told the truth
that they end and that's not always
bad, actually, that can be the birth
of your liberation.

That really led me to get so much

more clarity of where marriage
comes from and why are
relationships challenging? It really
made me want to start to teach it
to other people because I found I
was really feeling so witnessed within the work I was doing and
learning. I wanted other people to experience the freedom and
liberation that learning about relationships from a space of, it's a skill
set that anyone can develop and learn would free them and perhaps
give them access to the skills that would really affect the area of our
lives that has the greatest effect on our health.

It's amazing. We go all the way through school, even graduate school,
and are never taught about relationships and money. And then we
enter our lives in the two most complex areas that need the most
training are relationships and money.

Jeff Hays: So I want to look at relationships with you through the lens
of depression and anxiety. One of the things that's come up in all this,
in all of our depression and anxiety interviews, is the key importance
of connection.
And so I think some of your learnings here can help everyone. So first
off, you mentioned positive psychology for those of us that don't really
know the difference between psychology and positive psychology.
What is positive psychology?

Mark Groves: So the field positive psychology was originally founded

by Martin Seligman and it was looking at instead of where psychology
tended to have the lens of looking at what is wrong with people and
why is something wrong with them? It was looking at what is right
with people.

Why do some people thrive and others not? How do we get to this
state of flourishing and increasing our wellbeing?

Instead of studying people, which obviously it's a helpful lens to look

at people who are experiencing things like depression or anxiety. Can
we also look at, what is it about people who are thriving? What are
their daily habits? What are their beliefs like? How do they orient in
relationships?

And so it's really just taking this lens and flipping it to a positive
orientation of looking at, what skills can we build? What insights can
we get from these people living really incredible lives, no matter their
socioeconomic status.

Jeff Hays: So if someone is looking to create a new relationship and do

it right, what would you recommend to them?

Mark Groves: The best way to start a relationship is one with intention,
right? To get very clear on, what are our values, what do we want to
create?

You can certainly transform a relationship when you're in it. I would

say it's a lot more challenging to shift the focus of a relationship and
its values and agreements while you're in it. So while you're beginning
one and you're exploring and looking for one, it's getting very clear:
what is it that you want to share in terms of agreements with your
partner?

Listen, those agreements occur whether you express them or not. And
so we might as well get really clear on what they are so that we can
tell when we're in the dating process, we can tell people what we're
looking for.
I'm looking for someone
who values growth, who
values a shared space that's
about speaking the truth
over everything. When we
begin from that space,
what I normally find is that
when we enter a
relationship, we're usually
presenting our best
representative version of
ourselves. What we might
think is putting our best
foot forward, but we're
often putting our, sort of a
false foot forward.

This is about showing up as our authentic selves so that we don't have

to take a mask off when the relationship begins, we're already there.
And I feel like a lot of us have been taught that we need to pretend to
be someone to get a relationship.

But what that really means is that we're trying to pretend to be

someone else so someone will like us. And in doing that, we are really
ultimately becoming an actor. The foundations of the relationship is
created off this idea that neither of us are safe to be ourselves.

Not to mention that when you're not your authentic self at the
beginning of the relationship, not only are you sending the message to
yourself that you're not worthy of being loved for who you actually are,
but you're also not letting the other person get to know you.

It's highly manipulative. And so my advice to anyone looking for a

relationship is really get clear on what your values are. Get clear on the
type of relationship you want to create.
There's so much of this idea and this messaging that's sent by Disney
and just by culture to go find the one. Well, this perspective that there
is one person for us is in itself imprisoning because it creates a scarce
mindset.

As soon as we have any connection with anyone, we all of a sudden go

into this tractor beam focus. And what we do is we start to miss red
flags. We start to miss this opportunity to be discerning about who
we're choosing. And the dating process can be incredibly healing, it
can be adventurous. It can be fun. If it's none of those things, then
we're not actually operating from a space of empowerment.

We're not actually looking that ultimately when we're dating, what
we're doing is sorting. And we're saying, is this person a good fit for
me? Most of us, when we're looking for a relationship, we are saying,
do they like me? Oh, well then I like them. We're not actually standing
in the space of our own power being, as I said, discerning about what
we're choosing.
We should allow someone to become the one, not just give that title
to anybody because I could tell, as soon as you give that title to
someone they're likely to disappoint you. And because we're such a
stubborn species, we'd rather stay with the commitment to the title
rather than move on and really move towards a relationship that is a
better fit.

Jeff Hays: What are some of the agreements that people should
consciously discuss when entering into a relationship?

Mark Groves: I think the first one is a shared orientation towards

growth, both as individuals and as a couple. Really and also another
one is the honoring of each other's sovereignty. That sounds weird and
maybe sometimes even implied, but it certainly isn't.

Most of the relational structures that we have observed and inherited,

especially when we're looking up our own family trees, is actually
codependency and really that's ultimately pretending or self-
abandoning in order to be in relationship. And you see that when, for
example, women deny their ability to self-express, they don't use their
voice and there's obvious evolutionary and survival reasons for that.
And men denying their emotionality. That's most of what we observe
when we look up a family tree. And so being able to say, Hey, I honor
your growth and dreams and passions and self-expression, and I
honor mine.

What that really does is it says that this relationship is sacred. This is a
sacred space and we must treat it as sacred, but in order to commit to
the relationship, which is ultimately how we think of relationships is
this commitment to another person. There also needs to be a
commitment to self.

You actually can't be fully

authentically committed to
another person unless you are
committed to yourself because if
you're committed to them before
you're committed to yourself, then
you're willing to leave your own
self and your own beliefs and your
own values in order to be in
relationship with them.

Gabor Maté has this great saying

where he says that, "All humans
have two needs. We have the need
for self-expression and authenticity
and we have the need
for belonging." But when self-expression and authenticity threaten
belonging, belonging usually wins.

And I think we can sort of look at that and say, well, isn't that how so
many relationships work? We either are a doormat and we allow too
much often or we're an island and we don't allow anyone in.
So when we're beginning these relationships and we're looking at
what agreements… growth… the recognition and honoring of each
other's sovereignty, to be curious about one another's experiences,
what is the lens and history that has brought them into this moment.

When we start to be curious about our partner's pain and their

wounds and their childhood, then the relationship becomes a space
where we are both trying to heal from those things. There's a saying
that relationships are where our wounds occur and that's where they
must be healed. Of course, we can do a lot of work as individuals, but
it's actually not until our needs are bumping up against another that
we really see our skillset.

And I think that's a lot of the times that I'll hear people say, "Well, I was
doing so well when I was single and then I started dating and I
thought I had all my stuff figured out. And then I realized I got
triggered again." And I always say to them, "The trigger doesn't go
anywhere. The trigger is a beautiful warning sign. It's a radar."
 It's what we do with
triggers that matters. It's
that we choose to respond
by being informed by
them rather than react
and in some ways being
enslaved by them.

Jeff Hays: Are there ideas

that you've seen work for
couples to repair, rebuild
and renegotiate a new
relationship and rescue it?

Mark Groves: Well, I think it's important to recognize that both anxiety
and depression are really experiences we have to honor, that they are
informing us.

We live in a society and a world that says good feelings are good and if
you have what we would call negative feelings like sadness or grief or
anger, that there's something wrong with us. And there couldn't be a
more destructive message because we think of physical pain.

If my hand was touching a stove and it was burning, I would remove

my hand, obviously, ideally. But if my heart itself is touching a stove in
terms of what environment it's in and what it's experiencing, why is it
that we're taught to take something to numb that rather than be
informed that our environment needs to change?

I think often the way that we've made people feel about emotions, our
experiences in states like depression and anxiety, is that there's
something wrong with them... what happens if there's actually
something right with you that the emotions that your body is trying to
get you to feel are actually trying to get you to move and to change?
And that's what I really see is that emotion itself is so wise... In
relationship, when we can start to orient toward the experiences like
depression or anxiety, we can start to look at what am I actually
inhibiting? What emotions am I actually inhibiting? And the way that
couples can do that, couples that have a lot of contempt, which in
Gottman's Research, is what they call the Four Horsemen of the
Apocalypse, no small-term there.

But they're four things that are evident in higher quantities in all
relationships that end in divorce and contempt is one of them. And
contempt is really things like eye rolling. Eye rolling is actually the
most predictive behavior of divorce.

The 4 Horsemen of the Apocalypse

– John Gottman

Criticism

Contempt

Defensiveness

Stonewalling
Contempt is actually really hard to rescue a couple from because
there's so much built-up anger, grief, all the things. It's really
contempt that creates a hierarchy. The person who's rolling the eyes is
really above in the hierarchy. When there's a hierarchy created in a
relationship, you can't meet each other.

There's a lot of things that need to be cleared out. If a couple's

commitment is to repair and fully to repairing and growing, you can't
have one person that wants to repair the relationship. I see that often,
one person has cheated, and then they're in couples counseling and
the person's still cheating. You're not fully there.

So the first thing is recognition that no one person can do the work of
two, it's impossible.

There's not enough therapy you can do… because it requires both
people to authentically and intentionally be present to the repair and
the expansion of the relationship. The other side is that the couple has
to start to say, "We tell the truth over everything."
You know what this means is that whoever goes first because that's
usually what we're waiting for the other person to do is really saying
that I honor this connection with you so much that I'm willing to tell
you the truth, even if it hurts your feelings.

Because if you start to put other people's feelings and them not
experiencing any pain, any suffering, any hurt, any rejection, you will
be rejecting and internalizing the chaos you're avoiding within
yourself, hence depression and anxiety. So the states we avoid other
people experiencing, we really absorb.

I find often we try to save people or prevent people from feeling

feelings we don't actually know how to feel ourselves. Being able to
say, Hey, I miss you or I feel like we're distant or I feel like I'm not
experiencing love in this container anymore. Or I don't feel like I love
you anymore.

And being able to hear that back, whatever that might be, which I'm
not done dismissing that these words are painful. What I'm saying is
that they're liberating because those truths live anyway.
 It's much like someone
feeling kind of ill and
never going to the doctor
versus going to a doctor
and finding out what's up
so you can actually take
active measures to
change. When I liberate
myself by sharing what is
truly going on, then I am
actually liberating the
other person. They just
might not know it yet.

Glennon Doyle talks about that, that there is no such thing as one-way
liberation. That when one person is free, the other person is too. It's
just that they might not know that they are now invited to be and
they might want to go back to old patterns.

We have to be willing if we want to repair a relationship, we have to

be willing to let it end if it needs to because it ending in and of itself is
not a failure. The ending is actually progression if it's not aligned
anymore. That's something that as a culture and a collective, we need
to orient differently around.

That relationship endings are not failures, they're actually

opportunities to expand and grow and move towards something that
is more aligned. And truthfully, as Esther Perel talks about, let the old
relationship die, get divorced, and start a new relationship that's
based on different agreements.

So all couples can do it if they both want to. Sometimes one person
doesn't want to and again, that's okay.
I don't want people to think that if they see the four horsemen and
they see it present in their relationship, that all is doomed. They're
human behaviors. It's just that they're present in a really large quantity
in relationships that end in divorce. We can learn how to move past
what they are.

So one is criticism... That really pairs well with defensiveness, which is

really raising the game…. The last one is stonewalling, which is really
about shutting down, hanging up the phone, leaving, ghosting,
whatever it might be.

Really all of these are ways that we protect ourselves from being hurt.
So, although they're not productive for producing intimacy and
conflict resolution, they're actually highly productive as adaptive
strategies in order to not experience more pain.

Sometimes to try to get our message across, even though it's not
effective and it's really not going to work. We can learn how to express
differently… I'm a recovering defender as I like to say. One of the
antidotes to defensiveness is saying, I can see some truth in what
you're saying when you get feedback...
But the beautiful thing, when you start to change how you respond to
feedback and criticism and whatever that might be is that you end up
in conversations you've never been in.

So there needs to be a lot of compassion for our behaviors in relating,

even relating to emotion in the context of depression and anxiety. If
we look up our family trees, we will see that we learned how to do all
of these things from other people. Now we have this opportunity to
learn how to relate differently, to build a skillset. This is a skillset and
it's a skillset all of us can learn.

I remember the first time I read the Gottman's Four Horseman... I was
thinking to myself, "I've done all of these."

Even with awareness and knowledge, I've certainly done them since,
but it's about getting better and better each time. It's about
recognizing that with the shame that I felt in that moment of
awareness of recognizing that these behaviors were destructive to my
relationships or at least contributing to them not being a space of
wellbeing or safety, that shame could be healthy.
It could be an emotion that actually allowed me to transform and
change. That's how I see it now is that when we're brought forth with
new awarenesses, can we live in the integrity of our knowledge? So
many of us have so much knowledge, but yet we're not actually living
differently. When knowledge becomes behavior, when it becomes
changed behavior, then that's when it becomes wisdom. Until then
it's just potential that's not been realized.

When we're sitting on unrealized

potential and we're not in
integrity with our potential or our
knowledge, we will experience
depression. We will experience
anxiety because we're ultimately
producing a future that we likely
already know the outcome of. …
there's a different possibility
available to me and I have to start
moving towards that. We're
talking about an unfamiliar way
of being that requires the
ultimate courage, and really, isn't
that why we're here?

Jeff Hays: If someone's hungry for this information to learn how to

have better relationships, what trails would you put them on?

Mark Groves: Start with exploring oneself. The path to transformation

is introspection. It's being able to do an accurate audit of yourself and
your own behaviors.

That can be challenging, but it's important that we accept that every
relationship that we have been in, other than the ones we were born
into, we are in by choice. If we're still in relationship with unhealthy
parents, that's still by choice now.
When we can recognize that we're the common denominator in all of
our relational outcomes, well then we can take responsibility for our
lives. The recognition that all of our relationships have informed us in
terms of that audit of how we're showing up, they're all offering just
goals of information.

That we can explore much like an anthropologist might explore their

work. We can explore our relational history in that same way. So I'd say
about taking a journey of introspection.

What does depression do? It's much like grief. It roots us. It makes us
go into contemplation… ultimately depression is a defense
mechanism that prevents us from actually feeling the feelings that
we're not expressing. Depression is a defense mechanism from feeling.
So it really disassociates and detaches us.

Anxiety, shame, and guilt are inhibitory emotions that actually block
the feeling of core emotions, and core emotions would be…fear, anger,
joy, excitement, and disgust… sometimes we're inhibiting more than
one, we experience those inhibitory emotions, which are shame, guilt,
and anxiety. Really when we move past that, we end up in this space
of depression, which is really dissociation and detachment.

Watch Mark's interview in its entirety in the fascinating Anxiety &

Depression Docuseries!
FROM MARK'S JOURNAL...
Visit Mark's Journal online for more at markgroves.com/journal/

THE ONE DATING CONVERSATION YOU’RE NOT HAVING

THAT COULD MAKE OR BREAK YOUR FUTURE

When I was younger the setting of most of my teenage make-outs was

far from ideal. I mean, there was a roof over my head, and food in the
fridge, but in the basement of our family home, nestled in the back
corner, was our “study”. The temperature of our basement was
sometimes close to freezing, and I can remember mornings when I
could see my breath. Hardly the ideal environment to try to get a girl’s
clothes off.

But alas, I was a resilient young man. Temperature wasn’t going to

stop me from studying the female body. I can remember a specific
time when I was making out with a girl who I had been dating for a
little over a month. We hadn’t had “The Talk” yet, but I could feel it
perched on the ledge of her every breath.

As my hand moved to the clasp of her bra, she grabbed my face and
aggressively demanded my focus to her eyes. Raging with
testosterone and trepidation for the imminent conversation that was
about to happen, blood redirected itself to my brain to collect my
thoughts as she sheepishly mumbled:

“What is going on between us?”

Well, that killed the mood.

The man in me wondered, “Why couldn’t she have just waited another
forty-five minutes (ten minutes is probably more realistic) to have this
conversation?”

I had known that this conversation would come, and it would be the
end of my relationship-free romance. It wasn’t that I was seeing other
people, or that I didn’t enjoy her company. I did. I just didn’t want to
be ‘in’ a relationship with her.

Let’s talk about the dating and relationship rules that we seem to have
formulated when it comes to trying to navigate the booby-traps of
new love.

She wanted to talk about ‘us’ for awhile. She likely chatted with her
friends and they went through the formulaic algorithm that we seem
to have created for the specific question we all seem to ponder:

“When is it ok to have the talk about what our relationship status is?”

Let me be very clear: It is ok to have that conversation the moment

you wonder (I’ll explain).
I work with people all of the time who avoid this conversation because
they’re afraid of what they might hear. They’re afraid that the response
will be different than what they want to hear. They’re afraid that the
person they’re dating might not want what they want, and that scares
the crap out of them.

Think about what belief is REALLY going on here and what we’re
giving meaning to: Someone else not wanting what we want means
that they don’t want us.

AND... We would rather avoid that conversation to avoid rejection,

than get clear information on how to best make informed decisions
moving forward.

Look, I’m not here to sugarcoat or placate to the tenderness people

want to hear. I’m going to tell you what’s up.

Let’s consider how this impacts our lives; we avoid conversations

where we could get more clarity about someone’s intentions because
we’re afraid their intentions (to be or not be in a relationship) may not
match ours.

That’s seems sort of ridiculous, doesn’t it?! Let’s think of this scenario
differently. Imagine that lately you’ve been feeling ill. For some time
now, something in your body is just not feeling right. And, like most of
us, you consider your options:
(a) Go to the doctor, find out what’s going on (and maybe that it’s
nothing) and do something about it (or not), or

(b) Ignore it and allow it to grow into something that we can no longer
treat. And potentially, you could die.

Your sickness becomes a colossal mess because, out of fear of hearing

something might be wrong with you, you avoid the very information
that would allow you to make proactive decisions and act.

I know this sounds extreme — Because this is very serious.

Here are 4 long-term and very serious consequences of avoiding “The

Talk”:

1. You are building two roads to two different places:

Imagine that both you and your partner own a construction company,
and that this company builds roads. When you consider what the
company mission statement is, your belief is that you’re building roads
that lead to wedded bliss. And oddly, when probed, we find out that
his/hers leads to orgasms, lack of commitment, and fleeting love that
allows them to sample all the goods around.

Wow. Quite a difference. So, if this goes undiscussed, we’ll have one
company, building two different things. Doesn’t sound very smart,
does it?

When this happens in the context of relationships, we’ll have hurt,

anxiety, pain, and lots of time we can NEVER get back. All because we
never talked about relationship mission statements.

Don’t be fooled. Relationships require similar mission statements and

intentions. Because, when not aligned, all of a sudden, maybe it’s
three months or ten years down the road, you’re going to realize that
you’re not building what you thought you were building. And you’re
going to be really, really, really(really) angry.

And the truth is, you should be frustrated with yourself, because all
you had to do was ask.

2. You are destroying your self-worth:

When we avoid speaking our truth and what we desire from a

relationship, we step further and further away from our hearts. We are,
indirectly, telling ourselves that what we want isn’t important. Our
desires and beliefs don’t matter. What we need, doesn’t matter. We…
don’t matter. And if we have kids, we’re teaching them the exact same
thing. It is that big of a deal.

3. You are wasting valuable time:

Tick Tock goes the clock. Maybe right now you think it’s not a big deal
– you’ve got time, right? What’s another couple weeks or months?
Well, quickly, those months will turn into years. And you will be left in
a desecrated pile of “I should haves” and, “Why didn’t I justs” as you
pick up the pieces of your broken heart, one that you consciously
chose to break by not having the conversations that matter.
And if that doesn’t sound serious enough, consider how quickly our
lives can change. One coffee shop lineup, one yoga class, one walk in
the park. That’s all it takes to meet the person we’ve been seeking. But
you’ll never be in that position to meet them if you don’t take control
of your life and make conscious decisions about who you want in it.

4. You are filling the gap:

Maybe there’s many reasons you’re avoiding the conversation. Maybe

you like companionship? Great. Maybe you like getting laid and
spooning to Netflix marathons? Who doesn’t?! Maybe this person is
almost what you want but not quite it. What’s the harm?

But they’re not that person. And the longer you hold onto them and
fill the space of partnership in your life with mediocrity, you take away
the space for your match to enter it.

Chew on that for awhile (but not too long, we’ve got love to find.

Truth be told, there is no magic formula to dating. That’s why the

book “He’s Just Not That Into You” doesn’t mean anything when we’re
in the storm, because when emotion is involved it’s hard for us to be
impartial.

There are rules that are right sometimes, but if there is anything I’ve
learned from dating, it’s this:
When we are really into someone, none of the rules matter. All the
books and courses we have taken mean nothing. We text and call as
much as we want. We see each other as much as we want. We kiss
when we want. We even bang when we want. And we say, “I love you”
when we feel it.

When we start worrying about all the algorithms and pathways we

need to go down, we begin to step outside ourselves. We lose our
authenticity and our honesty, because we are pretending to be
someone we’re not.

Let’s be our quirky, funny, weird, witty, sarcastic, awkward, and

amazing selves. When we do that we give ourselves the freedom to
just be. We’re not putting our energy into pretending, and that means
we can put more energy into loving.

SPOILER ALERT: That girl and I broke up. And I never got to finish the
make-out. Because I didn’t tell her what she wanted to hear. I told her
the truth. The end.
Questioning
everything you
were taught about
relationships?
"...there was a part of me that thought, I think I'm supposed to be
more excited than this.”

"...feeling like you're taught to want these moments and then you
realize maybe you didn't want them, they're not authentic to actually
your experience or they’re a goal or sometimes a deadline in life
where they feel like one. "

" I felt I'd been lied to about love and relationships."

"I wanted other people to experience the freedom and liberation that
learning about relationships from a space of, it's a skill set that anyone
can develop and learn would free them and perhaps give them access
to the skills that would really affect the area of our lives..."

"What we might think is putting our best foot forward, but we're often
putting our, sort of a false foot forward."

Watch Mark Grove's interview with Jeff Hays in its entirety when you
view the fascinating Anxiety & Depression Docuseries!