28. | Dr. Alexandra Solomon | What It Really Takes To Love Bravely | Just Be You Podcast with Amber Hawken

The Amber Hawken Podcast

Dr. Alexandra Solomon is a licensed clinical psychologist at The Family Institute at Northwestern University and a clinical assistant professor in the Department of Psychology at Northwestern University. She's the author of the book Loving Bravely: Twenty Lessons of Self-Discovery to Help You Get the Love You Want and maintains a psychotherapy practice for individual adults and couples, so can you guess what we chat about?

Yup, l-o-v-e.

If you are a human you will get so much out of this conversation.

Warning: we go deep real quick! I’m attracting these BIG conversations about relationships, the masculine and feminine and love lately as it seems many of us are leaning in to love.

Alexandra shares her own core wounds with such self compassion and vulnerability, it felt like having an intimate D & M with a friend.

She brings up some hugely valuable points about the shame people can carry from moving through infidelity (and when they let that shame stop the relationship transforming in to the 2.0 version), how curiosity within our relationships creates self-awareness, and the side affects of infidelity on our sense of self. Alexandra also shares her personal experience (backed by research) about how to keep the spark alive in her own 20 year marriage which could literally change the way we approach long-term romance. We unpack relationships through these topics and so much more:

• How to know when to leave a relationship
• How to come back to yourself
• Why originally she resisted studying love because she was a feminist (and why that was an illusion)
• Why reclamation of our inner child/younger selves is the most powerful place to go to heal
• How active spiritual practices helped her move through the loss of her father
• The beauty of what can come from trauma
• Unpacking infidelity
• Dr Alexandra’s favourite questions to ask clients in therapy
• The bravest question to ask within a relationship
• The silver lining of cheating
• The top 3 ways to get the love you want
• How to keep intimacy alive in long term committed relationships

And so. much. more. You’re gonna want to listen to this one, folks, as it could change the way you approach your intimate relationships forever.

Stand in the truth of your story

I love that she describes the space between the stimulus and the response as the place where we can consciously choose how we are going to handle any situation - this is ultimately the power of mindfulness, which allows us to live with more vulnerability and open-heartedness.

What a pleasure to converse about bringing science and soul together for successful relationships. Be sure to drop me a comment on Instagram about your biggest takeaway from this episode and what you’re going to explore or apply to your own life for the sake of deepening your relationship to love.