Glennon Doyle Melton on Becoming a Love Warrior with Lewis Howes

Welcome everyone back to the School of Greatness podcast. Very excited about our crystal guest. We have Glenn and Doyle Melton in the house. I'm glad to see you. Thanks for being here. Very excited. You have a new book about to be published. I'm excited. to talk and delve into and you haven't written a book in a long time certain certain years when was the last time? um four years ago two three four years I think yeah okay and that wasn't even I mean it was a collection of essays so I learned that it's a lot harder to write a whole book when I was writing the second book I realized. that he had never written a book.

Oh, actually okay, this is brutally hard for me, but the first book was a bestseller in New York. a big hit, a big hit, yeah, and why do you think people resonated with that track? What was the title of the first book? Continue Warrior and why you think it was a huge success and why you think people resonated with that theme. I think she was just trying to, she was talking about things that, well, most women don't talk about and you know, like pain and drinking too much and addiction and how incredibly difficult marriage is, especially when you grew up. in a culture that tells you that marriage is like the finish line you know well you just get married and then it's all a happily ever after um so it hasn't been a happily ever after it's not a happily ever after for anyone you know it's a starting line it's not a finish line it's a beginning The line and

love

is hard and it's not pink and unicorns you know really oh man I mean maybe it's for everyone else it's not for Me, you don't poop in the bowls, no, no one in my family does, it's okay, they're hard to live with.

They are amazing and wonderful, it is the best, the best part of life, but they are also the most difficult relationships, okay? What do you think has been the most painful experience in your marriage? I know which one has been the most, so Love Warrior is the book that's coming out next, yeah, um, and that book is a book that I actually wrote in my closet, in your closet, yeah, in my closet every morning, It's great for someone who's prone to depression to have to spend all day in a 10-footer, yeah, um, but after 10 years of marriage, Craig and I were in therapy one day, just working on some communication stuff. , and he told me that he had been unfaithful in our marriage in therapy for the first time, revealing this.

Yeah, and our therapist didn't even know and I had no idea how every time people told me or told me in the past that they didn't see it coming or that they didn't know, I always thought, come on, yeah, yeah, but. you really didn't see it coming i had no idea no idea and um oh my god it was just i remember that day like it was yesterday like just hearing that news and um and after that time craig moved away and our life just fell apart um and during that separated impulses not divorced not divorced I mean I plan on getting divorced but we were separated um and I was just doing what women do it was like holding my breath and trying to smile and trying to keep my kids okay we had it three little ones who had this was completely unexpected for them too because they had, I mean, they had Craig, an amazing father and they had a happy life and um, so it's terrible and anyway, just writing in the morning was the only time I had to do it. , you know, I write like I write like a detective looking for clues like I'm clueless all day and then if I can I have no fucking idea what's going on and then if I have an hour where I can write words and I can see the patterns in my life and get clues about what to do next, but I never wrote every day and that's how I stayed sane during that time, you know? because you have to pretend that everything is okay, especially when you have okay kids, you have to act like you know you can't be in crisis they're going to say: what's wrong? yeah, they're going to be no, mom's job is just like I like to smile like the titanic it's like you know everyone's still dancing, still playing the music, we're fine, yeah, um, so that was my honest moment. , wow, so we were separated for, I guess, six months, um, and then the thing is I had I've been derock this is how I think I think about this is like the bottom of my marriage, right, but the good news is that I had hit rock bottom before, it's okay, because when I was addicted since I was 10 years old I became bulimic.

When I was 10 years old. It's half a unicorn life. I still laugh, so it's okay, but yeah, I became bulimic when I was 10 and then I never could figure it out, so it turned into other addictions like addiction. Know? Sex or whatever and enjoy it all, I'm just getting it all back, so when on Mother's Day 13 years ago I found myself on the floor shaking from a hangover and terror and looking at something positive. pregnancy test and that was the first moment I thought I wanted to be a mother, I think it was the first time I wanted to be something more than I wanted to be numb and I learned early on that life was scary. and hard and I was going to hide in addiction.

I think addiction is really a hiding place for sensitive people. You know, it's just a place where you can go and feel safe and comfortable, and

love

and pain can't touch your control. I guess it's true. You are in control of your own pain, but the thing is, love and pain are the only things you grow from, so you are safe, but you don't grow well. But I because of that low moment, that low moment. on the bathroom floor was the best moment of my entire life, like it was the end of the world because I knew I was going to have to do it in order to be a mother.

I knew I was going to have to give up my whole life because my whole life was alcohol and partying, so it felt like the end, but really it was just beginning and everything beautiful in my life came from that moment on the bathroom floor, like that. that I knew enough during that bottom of my marriage to know that that bottom can be the most powerful place in the world if you can stay with it so that you are aware of it in the moment, yes, totally, I mean, I always have two Of me, there is a part of me that is like going crazy and that feels deep pain and then there is the writer part. from me that's like oh this is interesting this is like good material let me write this right now sit with this and go deeper, you know, um, so yeah, I mean, I knew I had to dive into it, figure out what it's all about. .

I wanted to say and that's when I ended up in therapy. Craig ended up in therapy and he just didn't have a bone of pride in his body. He just did all the work while I did my work and we eventually ended up getting back together. but as completely different people in a completely different marriage, which is interesting, right, you can have a new marriage and yes, with the same person, so it's a six month separation and he came back, you decided it was worth coming back, obviously probably not. I don't want to leave, I guess after no god, no, he didn't want to leave, no, he was, he was sharing, it was really very anything, in a fearful way, it wasn't like he was saying this and whatever happens. no, oh my gosh, yeah, I mean, this could never work for anyone unless both people are 150 million percent dedicated to doing whatever it takes, you know, and that's why so many of my friends have loved their marriages and have put so much hope and love. like I did and it doesn't work because the other person isn't, you can't control how much the other person wants it, you know there doesn't have to be anything that matters except starting over, yeah, so when did you realize that?

You didn't really love him and you didn't want to get divorced um well after six months we moved back in together but we were in different rooms after six months that's when I thought I'd consider trying it. But when I said "right, I love you," that was open to the potential of not murdering you, right, and I'm not making any promises, so we moved back in, but we were still like in two different rooms and that's when we started the therapy. together, it's okay, but that was just the beginning, I mean, we're still working, working, working, it's been years letting go of the pain, yeah, the fears, 'cause it's not like, I mean, this was years ago, yeah , four years ago, it is fine, and it can still feel fresh.

I mean, you can imagine, and I've talked to so many women about it, that it feels frustrating because you feel like you're making progress and things are getting normal again and then one day you wake up and it's like all the pain is there again. some kind of trigger happens or sometimes, well, yeah, whatever, I mean, for me it's because I'm always writing books about it for Craig, right? Did you forget that you married a writer and you are the main character of every issue? of everything in my book, yes, of course, but I think this is a progress through something like this, there is something traumatic, what's more, it is not linear, it is not that we go from healthy or unhealthy to healthy or From failure to success, I think everything is circular, you know?

You just go back to the same pain and the same loneliness, but every time you go back you're stronger for the climb, you know, I can feel it like I can feel myself, I mean, in the beginning, when my imagination was going crazy and I just lay down, I want I mean, I couldn't get out of bed and now it comes and it's like, oh, there it is again and we're going around and around, we're getting stronger every time, so it's a trip, but um, but yeah, that was definitely the most painful moment. Do you think pain is a choice we all have or is it something necessary for us all to experience in order to grow?

Oh my gosh, I'm fine, first of all, I'm really excited. about pain, I can't believe you just asked me that question, so I'm someone who avoided pain completely for the first 25 years of my life, because I thought I couldn't handle it, so whatever it took to hide from it pain. right food drink whatever i recently discovered oh my god i think that everything i need to become who i met the woman i'm meant to be is actually inside that pain so sitting in this hot yoga class right when everything he went crazy and miserable and that was it and I ended up sitting still for 90 minutes because I couldn't move.

I wasn't very depressed and I had this crazy experience where every fear and pain I ever had was like appearing in front of me and I had nothing to do. I'm so used to doing whatever it takes to avoid the pain, you know, um, it was like a game of whack-a-mole where there's no um, there's no mallet and all your all the moles are like your deepest fears and pains um and I was crying the whole yoga class and at the end of the yoga class the yoga instructor realized it and it was like she knew what was happening, she says, that was the

warrior

's journey.

And I thought, what the hell is so weird about yoga? So I get in my truck and I drive home and I have this deja vu experience, so I get home and I open this book that I've been reading. and it was by the Buddhist monk of Pima Chadron and the paragraph said that if today you can sit with burning solitude for 1.6 seconds when yesterday you could only sit with it for one, then that is the

warrior

's journey and I realized, oh Oh my gosh, this is what I've been doing since I was 10 when I was 10 I started having these feelings of fear, pain, like uncomfortable feelings like fear and envy and, um, loneliness and otherness, and since we're just talking about bright and happy feelings.

I thought there was something wrong with me, you know, I thought these feelings were something to be ashamed of, something to numb, so the amazing thing is that just when you start to feel your burning loneliness, the world starts showing you all these easy buttons, so, mine was food at the moment when the burning loneliness began to bubble inside and I numbed it with food and then it was alcohol, then it was drugs, some people are, you know, other people's bodies, sexual purchases, cruelty, as if all these things were easy buttons that we use to transport. get out of our pain to not feel, to not feel, but the problem with transportation is that you miss out on your entire transformation because all the lessons that we need to know to become the people we are meant to be are inside the pain and I was like oh God. mine, that is, I am like a butterfly, like a caterpillar jumping out of the cocoon just before I become a butterfly, because we think of pain as if it were a hot potato, you know, the moment we feel it, we must get rid of it . like cruelty every time someone is nice to you it's just that they just felt the burning loneliness but they thought it was a hot potato so instead of feeling it they pass it on to you yeah but pain is not pain is not a potato hot It's like I now see him as a traveling professor who comes and knocks on everyone's door and the wisest people I know just say come in and don't leave, that's why I have this beast that I still have tattooed on my wrist because I believe than being able to be still within the pain and just let it come and know whatever it is, fear, anger, loneliness,people are going to learn from this.

Well, it's not an easy book. It is beautifully written. Thank you. Thank you. It is not an easy book to read. It's raw and much more honest. than people are usually about their marriage, you're very honest, what do I think it's really about, because I mean there's a reason I didn't call out love warriors, like I don't really see it as a story. of marriage, in fact, I look at it like what happens to someone when the fan really hits and you're knocked down to the bottom and you have the choice to just wither away or just rebuild yourself again and that's why I call it a love warrior because it really I think if our marriage hadn't gotten back together, it would have been written anyway, true, it would have just had a different ending, but it still would have been the warrior's journey, yeah, I think what it's about is how our ideas, our cultures, ideas.

What our culture teaches us about masculinity and femininity makes it nearly impossible for real men and women to love each other. It's so true, I mean, I think that's what it all comes down to and I think that for there to be a real A real man and a real woman to really love each other, the woman and the man that you're seeing in front of you, what is It requires is an incredible unlearning, an unlearning of everything the culture has tried to teach you about what it means to be. a man, what it means to be a woman, that's what it was like for us, was breaking away from this training ground of realizing how much we had been poisoned by our culture until we were stripped of who we really were and we were like, oh my God, Like I'm finally seeing you.

I don't see this idea of ​​what I think a man is supposed to be and I'm no longer being this idea of ​​what I think a woman is supposed to be. It's actually me, it actually goes back to that damn poem at the beginning of the Bible, it's the garden of Eden, it's like I'm finally naked and unashamed in front of you, um, that's what it's about, I love it, thank you, I loves. I'm excited and well, it's out. Well, it will come out depending on when it comes out. You can book right now. Yeah. I'll have it all linked here at the end of this, but it's called Love Warrior. so make sure you read it, it's an exciting book so I'm glad you're writing it and I know my people will love it.

You have some questions left. Yeah, this is something I ask a lot of people at the end of my interviews and um, before we get to that question, let's ask you another question, what are you most grateful for in your life recently? I'm very grateful for my sobriety, um, I'm very grateful for my spread, I'm looking forward to sobriety. For me, I mean, for me it wouldn't even make sense to save any people because I don't get anything. I don't get love from my people without my sobriety, so I can't believe it the way I do.

I started this life and ended up in a place where I can deal with what comes at me in real life. I can deal with the reality of the world and love and pain without easy buttons, that's what I'm most grateful for. Great, uh, it's the end of your life many, many years from now. You've had an incredibly full life. You have achieved all the dreams you ever imagined. It has happened, which I am sure it will. You have everyone there. peaceful and you're about to pass out for the last time and it's the last time and for some reason all your books, all your blog posts, everything you've created has been deleted for some reason it's okay and someone in the family says You have a piece of paper and a pen and we know you love to write, so you can write down three final truths, three things that you know are true about everything you've learned in this life and that you want us to remember. you and us to use as lessons, so what would those three truths be?

Oh Lord, have mercy. First of all, this is a very sad scenario. Try to recover from that hypothetical. Okay, so we have three family mantras that we say over and over again. We've been saying since my kids were little, um, and they're all over our house, so it's ingrained in them, so I think really, if my family was around me, what I would tell them is what I've always said. I told them we can do hard things, we belong to each other and love wins, the loved ones, love wins, love wins, rob bell there, okay, we had that sign long before love went crazy, it's so weird because we're just I always love that man, amazing, um, but yeah, I mean, those are every time you know when the marriage implosion might be what we would say, we can do it, we can do hard things, we can do things difficult and we belong to each other.

Mother Teresa's quote, that is, if we don't have peace it's because we've forgotten that we belong to each other and I mean most of my work with Together Rise, which is a non-profit organization, is Just try to remember that we are a human family and you know that if we are going to find peace it will be by remembering that we belong to each other. I love that and love wins, you just know that there are always two options in front of you and them. There is always love and fear, yes, always, and you know we can choose fear as much as we want and I do it all the time, but we know it won't get us anywhere, yes, we know that choosing love is usually the most difficult. choice, you know, and it's the one that's always worth it, so those scenarios, like mom, those are the three things that over and over again are incredible, if they gave you, I gave you a lump sum of money that was essentially a unlimited amount of money would solve a problem in the world and you could use it only for that thing and when you spent it it would solve the problem of this thing in the world, what would you want to solve well right now?

It would be the refugee crisis. I mean that's what we tried to do with our little one, we did a compassion collective at Christmas with um liz gilbert and robin rob bell and cheryl strade and bernay brown, oh my god I understand what's going on right now with displaced people breaking free of fleeing terror and no home for their children and terrorized countries that are afraid to let them in and I know that's complicated, but through that effort and a lot of what Amy does with Together Rise, we've learned more than that I could. ever I don't know um it becomes pretty much everything we think about um the collective effort of compassion continues we're working with a group called refugee aid that's all over the place it's a UK based organization and they're amazing they're in all camps.

Trying to feed and clothe and save these babies, so you know, that would be it right now, okay, amazing and your life is extremely public, you write everything about everything, what's something you haven't written about and that people He doesn't know about you. what you're really proud of oh my god that's weird well okay so I have this thing that I won't do it so we have this thing about growing together where we say we always want to be better than people think we are because I feel Many organizations are not as good as people think, you know?

They have amazing things that they tell people about them, especially nonprofits, or whatever, but when you dig deeper, I want to be the opposite of that, I want to be like the more people pull out, the more they'll say oh my God. mine and they do that and they do that, so we're always doing the things that the joint uprising does behind the scenes, things that no one will know. I would do it because I am an incredibly proud person. I would love for someone to accidentally discover it. Everything you know, but um, I don't know.

I mean, my people work hard every day to Keep People's Lights On and to help people adopt children and to God, it never ends, so I'm tremendously proud of the work that Together Rise does every day and not just about big things like refugees and love. flash mobs and all that, I'm talking about the little things like every day, the emails we get from people who have needs and trust us to meet them and every day those things happen, it's kind of magic, I love it, great, an ending. Ask before you ask, uh, I want to thank you, Glennon, for your incredible gift, your love, and the choice you make every day to tell the truth, to be honest about everything, and to choose love.

I think it's amazing that you're doing the work that you continue to go around the country in the world and showing up for people who want to listen and who want to show up boldly in their lives and I think it's amazing that you're a symbol for so many people to see what it's possible. not what is perfect but what is possible and so I really want to recognize you for the incredible gift that you are and I appreciate you oh my gosh that was beautiful no one ever does that they are so good you are so good at people watching , thank you.

You're welcome, uh, my last question before I ask it, where should we connect with you online? Where do you like to spend the most time? Yeah, I'm like an old soccer mom, so I'm on Facebook. Okay, my son is just like mom. older people are on Facebook and I said no I love Facebook and he says exactly wait I'm not that young anymore yeah so I'm on Glennon Doyle Melton on Facebook and I also love Instagram and then I'm on Twitter but I suck . on Twitter, so all I do is accidentally retweet people I don't know.

Yesterday I accidentally tweeted a deodorant company so I'm not very good at Twitter so maybe Instagram and Facebook Instagram is good yeah I like your Instagram thanks great and also your site monastery.com monastery.com and get the book warrior love we'll have it all linked here in a second in the show notes the final question is what is your definition of greatness I love people I think people are great, whether they are We are doing big, shiny things that They are visible or like the hard work of the world, like relationships and parenting, and that time and time again they relentlessly choose love, whether anyone knows it or not, that is greatness to me, I love it, Glennon , thank you very much for Come on, I appreciate you a lot, you are the best, I appreciate it, oh, thank you.

Hey guys, Louis Howes here and thank you so much for watching this video and this interview. I hope you liked it. If you did, be sure to leave a comment below. share this with your friends i also have a big announcement the greatness summit is coming very soon if you love the school of greatness podcast if you love these interviews and want more want to connect with some of these speakers in person If you want to connect with me and Other people like you watching and listening to these interviews, be sure to sign up for Summit of Greatness.

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