Transcript from Annie Lalla AMA: It Doesn't Take a Lot to Be in Love

A live recorded conversation on UpTrust between Jordan Myska Allen and Annie Lalla, part of the #heywait launch series.

Watch the recording or see the original AMA post, where the live questions came from.

Whether You’re Crying Over a Private Jet, the Pain Is Still the Same

[00:00:45]

Jordan: You just came from leading something, right? How are you feeling?

Annie: I had to teach a sales webinar today, then I had to run into a teaching class for high-net-worth women, and then I’m coming here. So I’m going to talk about love and money all day.

Jordan: That’s the best — love and money. So you’ve worked with a bunch of high-net-worth people. Do you find there’s any distinction in the problems that high-net-worth people have?

Annie: Yeah. Affluent people have a different psychology, and you have to know how to dance with them. You have to remember: regular people talk about their problems and people are sympathetic. But high-net-worth people don’t get sympathy from anyone, because they’re the rich person. It’s interesting — a lot of my clients are actually more successful than me in financial status and all that. Affluent people have very successful lives, but they have this one area where I’m helping them, which is their relational dynamics and their emotions. It’s almost like they need extra support. They’re almost not as resilient sometimes.

And I don’t make them wrong for that. They’re just a human being. Whether you’re crying over your private jet or your kids can’t go to school, the pain is still the same, believe it or not. They’re still in pain. So I’ve let go of the idea that some people have more trauma than others. People feel heartbroken over all kinds of things, and the heartbreak is real.

Jordan: And so that’s one of the ways you’re uniquely valuable to them. Like — oh, holy shit, this person is seeing me as a human being, not as a set of numbers.

Annie: Exactly. When I meet someone, I literally scan for their humanity, and then I meet them energetically. I make my heart send a little signal to their heart, and I try to indicate: all your feelings are safe with me. Any thoughts or worries or anxieties are safe and welcome here. I may or may not say it explicitly, but I energetically broadcast it, because they don’t get that in their life. They’re the leaders of all the systems, and there’s no refuge, no sanctuary for them. So we have to ramp up the safety if we’re going to do the work — well, the work that I do.

Jordan: Why do they need to feel safe to do the work you do?

Annie: Well, I’m basically a heart surgeon. Not a physical heart surgeon — but I am asking someone to open their kimono, peel off their guarded armor, and offer up the delicate underbelly of their pain. If we’re really going to do the work around matters of the heart and relational dynamics, they’re very vulnerable, they’re very tender. They don’t have a lot of ability to navigate that space. It’s dark.

I create maps for a living — to navigate the complex terrain of a human psyche, and in particular the space between two human psyches. So I’m quite versed. I’m like a race car driver who’s been driving for years. They don’t have language for it; it’s just inchoate, unparsed. And when you’re taking someone into a new space they haven’t mapped, it’s territory of their psyche that they’re not even aware of — far less are they trying to open it up to someone else.

So optimizing for emotional safety is the key if you’re dealing with relational dynamics. And most people don’t even realize this in their own romance, or with their own kids: if you’re not getting something you want in life, you need to ramp up emotional safety — in yourself first. I have to create a very robust sense of safety in my nervous system so that another person can feel sanctuary here, so that I can hold space for whatever’s arising in them and they don’t have to micromanage me or host me.

Also, people don’t learn — new synaptic connections aren’t being made — until the nervous system feels safe. That’s when learning happens. Otherwise we’re in fight or flight. I’m wanting to train new ways of being, create new frames, new skills, new tools, so I need a safe nervous system. Sometimes I have to regulate the other person — actually be a surrogate parent in the moment and help them co-regulate. But as a professional, I want to wean them onto their own regulation skills so they’re not dependent on me. Over time I have to teach them to become their own attachment figure.

Conflict Is a Collaboration Trying to Happen

[00:05:54]

Jordan: So we could dive in there. There’s already a question: cartographer of love. You mentioned this — you’re mapping the relational space. So tell us more about some of these maps.

Annie: It’s a metaphor, because I think of the relationship between two people as terrain. It’s territory. When I say I’m making maps, I’m literally thinking: well, how do you deal with shame? What is involved? The maps could be a set of heuristics, tools, emotional technologies, frames. If someone gives me a specific situation, I’ll give you the map. But if they’re asking what I mean by cartographer: I mostly help people map their own mind. I ask them questions, the answers to which have them go to the edge of their currently mapped understanding — of themselves, of the situation, of the world. And now we’re embarking together into new uncharted territory. That’s spooky, but if you have someone with you, you can go adventuring. And that’s what I see myself doing.

Now, I don’t have the map for the client’s mind, but I have the map for how most humans react in the situation — and we share 99% of our DNA with each other, so I’m mostly right when I’m attempting to model. When we’re mapping uncharted terrain together in a human psyche, in an emotional field, I might offer multiple choice. I might say: when your wife said this, were you feeling angry, scared, ashamed, frustrated, overwhelmed? It’s much easier, when someone’s in a low-resource state, to pick one of five things than to have to come up with something and collapse the infinite quantum wave into one instantiated reality. If I give them a multiple choice — do you want to eat macaroni and cheese, a sandwich, or spaghetti? — they can either say spaghetti or say, Actually, I want mashed potatoes, because their brain just deals with that one categorization. There’s infinitude courting them, and I don’t want to give cognitive overload to someone who’s already low-resourced. So that’s something I might do — offer options.

I navigate people through conflict; I specialize in conflict resolution. And basically, conflict is a collaboration trying to happen, but being stymied by the enemies of collaboration, which are coercion and collapse. A collaboration is actually a conflict that’s resolved — they’re two sides of the same coin. So I help people map and navigate conflict space toward collaboration space, and I build pathways between the two.

What Do You Deludedly Believe You’d Have to Give Away?

[00:08:58]

Jordan: There’s so much to dive in on. But I want to invite people who are listening to propose things, and I’ll start with a specific one that I see really commonly — I think you already have a map for this. I find it often the case: there’s a gorgeous mid-thirties woman who wants a life partner and just somehow keeps not finding one.

Annie: It’s eluding her. Yeah.

Jordan: What is going on? She’s such a catch — she’s never been married, she’s emotionally mature. I’m like, what is happening?

Annie: What’s happening is she’s in low-level terror around a romantic partner, and she may or may not be aware of this. We all know Freud told us there’s the conscious mind and the unconscious mind. So there’s this woman who’s beautiful and wants to find a partner. Her conscious mind has its foot on the gas: I want to find my soulmate, I want to be in love, let’s go — what’s going on? That’s the conscious mind, which is less than 10% of what runs our life. Then there’s the unconscious mind that’s got its foot on the brake. That’s why someone is stuck. Whenever we’re stuck, there’s a parts conflict — one part wants to go, one part’s protecting or conserving something.

When I’m working with someone who is unpartnered and ready to find their soulmate, I’m asking: what do they dream about? What are the implications of that? What are they struggling with now? But what I really want to get to with this lady is: what’s something in your life, hun, that you value a lot right now, but you think you’d have to give it up if you suddenly found your soulmate tomorrow? At first they’ll be like, Nothing — I would do anything. And as we play around with it a little bit, I might say: imagine I have a magic pill, and I’m handing you this magic pill, and you believe in my wizardry. As soon as you ingest it, you will literally — within 24 hours — fall in love, for sure. Play this thought experiment with me. Okay, here’s the pill. And I have them pretend, and they take it from my hand, and they bring it up to their mouth really slowly — because I want them to go slow enough to notice if there’s any hesitation, perturbation, nervousness.

And then we get to trace that. It’ll always be something like: whoa, will I still be able to go away for the weekends? Will I still have my freedom? Can I keep my cats? Can I stay with my photography career? There’s some story they have — which is not necessarily accurate — that if they fall in love, they’ll have to give up something. And they have it as true. It has never occurred to them otherwise. So someone will say, Well, if I found my soulmate, I might have to give up my job as a freelance photographer. I like my freedom. I like flying around on the weekends. And I ask them: has it ever occurred to you that if you found your actual soulmate — which, by the way, will be a trampoline for your dreams and a sanctuary for your heart and a fierce stand for your full self-expression — has it ever occurred to you that the right person would enhance your photography career, that you would expand in that domain of your life and have even more freedom to express? And never have they said yes. It’s always a new belief.

So what I’m doing is lifting a belief that’s in their unconscious mind, emancipating it into their conscious mind, and then offering a new one that is actually more likely to be true — which has never been entertained before. And now I’ve incepted the seed of possibility. Because up until then, there was an embargo on protecting the thing that they want, because they thought it was a trade-out. And so I’m shifting that dance in their mind.

Jordan: I love it. It’s so trustable. This is what we teach in the Relateful coaching program, this is kind of like Robert Kegan’s immunity to change, this is Existential Kink —

Annie: Competing commitments. Yeah, of course.

Jordan: And I love hearing the way you do it, because it just increases the possibility for people to see that. Even the going slow — really imagine it, feel it, and go slow enough to notice the terror come up. What is it that I’m going to have to give away?

Annie: What is it that I deludedly believe I have to give away? Which makes sense, man. If every romantic relationship you had in your past was fraught with a particular pattern, it makes sense you would extrapolate that out into the future. But I always remind my clients: you didn’t marry them. They didn’t make the cut. So stop extrapolating what didn’t work into the future. We’re creating from scratch — making something new.

You Gotta Be Out in the World Doing Your Bird Call

[00:13:16]

Annie: And one thing I would say to this woman — this beautiful woman who can’t find a partner — is that I have certain hacks I give individuals who are trying to call in love. One of them is to be out in the world doing your bird call. Man or woman: if you want to find your soulmate, they have to smell your soul. And the only way someone can smell your soul is — it needs a carrier wave. It needs you to be doing the thing that brings you most alive, brings you into flow, either online or in the real world, so that you’re dancing your soul’s essence dance, however it is. That’s how your soulmate can find you — they triangulate you. So you’ve got to be out in the world doing your bird call. That’s one.

And second: often these women don’t realize that they go into a particular pattern around men in general, or men they’re attracted to — often influenced by their original imprint of what the masculine archetype is, which is their father. They unwittingly smear whatever imprint they had with their dad — good, bad, and indifferent — onto any man they meet. And they’re not aware that how they’re showing up in front of a man is not the highest version of themselves. It’s not their full power.

So I give them this heuristic, which is a great tool for any woman looking for their partner: treat every single man you meet — a 12-year-old neighbor’s kid, a teenager at Starbucks, an 80-year-old at a pharmacy that you hold the door for — treat them as if they’re an avatar of your soulmate, sent back in time to interview you and see where you are in your personal development journey. Are you ready for your soulmate? And the way they know is how they feel after the interaction with you. Imagine after you interact with the 80-year-old, he’s going to send an energetic email to your soulmate going, Oh man, I felt like a king in front of her. She’s ready for you — or not. It calls you to bring your A-game of highest womaning, to call forward the highest version of that man. You don’t have to flirt — but every guy you meet is either the one or practice for the one, so you always bring your A-game.

And the image I have when I interact with a man is that his mother is standing two feet behind him, watching how her little boy is getting treated. How would you have to treat that man to conserve his dignity and self-esteem, so that the mother can wink at you and smile and be grateful — even if you’re saying no to a come-on? How do you do it in a way that conserves their dignity and self-esteem? I think if you bring that level of consciousness to your womaning, your man’s going to find you.

The Child Is a Time Capsule for Immortality

[00:16:10]

Jordan: Ooh. Yeah, I like it. Okay, this is great. You come alive in these specifics, and you’ve done so many of them, so let’s do another one. This is common in my world, because I’ve got a two- and a four-year-old: fresh parents. They’ve got a six-month-old, maybe, and they are struggling. They had an amazing relationship — or at least a good one — and then suddenly they have a baby, and they are in the worst patterns of themselves. Or at least one of them is.

Annie: Yeah, totally. For sure. I think I read that 70% of any disposable time and attention goes out the window the minute you have a child. So just get that. Now we’re competing for the coveted resource, which is my attention — from whatever I want to do with it. So now you’re competing over a scarce resource. Just think about two people starving in a bedroom — how’s that going to go?

And I have this saying: all of your wound patterns and your shadow that all of your personal growth work — your books, your Landmark seminars — haven’t handled, get handled when you fall in love. But whatever doesn’t get handled by the crucible of being in love will get handled when the child shows up. And remember, the child is the time capsule for immortality for both of these lineages that have come together, and they’re fighting over what gets into that time capsule. Well, the genes are already there — but what memes get to go into the child? The power struggle between a husband and wife — even if you have it before you have the child — is all practice for the arm wrestle about which memes are going into this child. So it exacerbates when the child’s there.

So what I would say is, first of all: welcome. This is completely normal. I’ve never seen a new-parent couple not have problems. Even the couples where I was like, Oh my god, will they ever need me? call me up in those times. So I just want to normalize it and say: you’re going through an identity transformation. And every time we go through a shift in identity, there’s a transformational dilemma, where parts of our old self are pulling us, and parts of our new self — and we’re straddling these two realms. And this liminal space is not very well mapped. No one really talks about it, and it’s basically terrifying. We see the hero’s journey and go: oh, you get the call, and the mentors. But no one talks about what it feels like to be in the hero’s journey, and it basically feels like terror, dread, overwhelm — and moments of clairvoyance and blindness, and someone guiding you in the dark. It’s pretty terrifying. But that’s the cost of growth.

So I don’t know if I’m answering your question, but I would normalize it, and then I would say: hey, whatever’s coming up now was always in there. It’s like when the doctor finds a tumor — you don’t blame the doctor. The tumor was already there. Whatever crazy shit comes up in the early days of romance or the early days of parenting was latent, lurking, waiting for an opportunity to come up so that you could work through it in tandem, breathe through it, alchemize, and integrate the education that is courting you.

Every Relationship Is a School

[00:19:31]

Jordan: Is there ever a situation where you would recommend people —

Annie: Breaking up? Yeah. I call it graduating. Every relationship is a school. And when you graduate from university, it’s not a failure — it’s a success. You have your degree, you got your education, and you celebrate. So I really want you to see breakup as a graduation. And there’s a way to optimize your graduation so that you’re in good shape for your next relationship. The quality and consciousness that you bring to your last relationship, and to the graduation process, governs your success in the next. So it’s really important to handle it in a way that conserves your dignity and their dignity, and the self-esteem of both people involved — which is a work of art. How to tie a relationship in a bow as you complete, so you can sign your name to it triumphantly, is a skill. And I like to teach that skill, because otherwise it’s going to haunt you.

So there are times when that’s appropriate. Every guy I dated before my husband, I graduated with. And that was the right move. So — how to know when you should stay or when you should go? Is that the question?

Jordan: No, it was just — well, you’re killing it, and I’m going to read some of the positive comments.

[Chat comment:] Getting latent, lurking crazy shit — I’m laughing out loud.

[Chat comment:] LOL, Annie is also nailing you.

Jordan: And this one was from earlier, about giving somebody who’s low-resourced five quick picks to select from, or a clear opening to let us know we’ve got it wrong — someone said they love that there are these clear, simple, direct tools.

Annie: Oh my god, I had to teach my husband that out of desperation. I was in surgery, I came out of surgery, I’m at home, I can’t move my arms. And he’s like, Are you hungry? Are you hungry? And I’m like: don’t fucking ask me if I’m hungry — give me five things that you’re ready to make. Because I already feel like I’m incapacitated and I’m a loser and I can’t make my own food. So I’m already dealing with the shame of being impotent; now I’ve got to feel like I’m inconveniencing you. Are you hungry? No, I’m not fucking hungry. Just bring me goddamn food. So I have learned, from both sides of this, that when people are struggling, they need you to make it as easy as possible for them to just say yes, no, or option five. Trying to get them to take the infinity of possibilities and collapse it into one answer is too much work.

It Doesn’t Take a Lot to Be in Love. It Just Takes Everything.

[00:22:10]

Jordan: Yeah, exactly. Okay, here’s another interesting scenario that just popped into mind as you said that: a couple that’s been together for, say, decades. Their kids have long since left the nest, and they’re actually just not compatible anymore, in a certain way. Do you see that? What do you think of that — is that true? I mean, should they graduate when they’re 80?

Annie: I don’t know. So I’m going to say something kind of edgy and controversial, because I’m an innovator — I just think in my own terms. I don’t believe in compatibility or incompatibility. It’s just: when are you ready to do the work? How much work are you ready to do? And then you pick a partner. I mean, if you want to buy a car and you want the best car, you need to wait till the day before you die to buy the car, because that’s when you’re going to get the best car. But you need a car now. So you make a call. You do your research, you do your due diligence, you date — which is basically interviewing for the highest-quality teacher you can find to emancipate you from your small defended self into your greatness. That’s what being in love is. So — never settle. Never settle. It’s the most important job you’ll ever hire for, and it’s the father or mother of your future kids. Hello! So never settle for anything less than the most inspiring human you’ve ever met. That’s who you should marry.

But this compatibility thing — honestly, I think people just fucking give up too easy. They somehow think love is supposed to be easy. Why is it so hard? We shouldn’t be fighting so much. My husband nailed it. He said: it doesn’t take a lot to be in love. It just takes everything. Everything. Love is like the emotional CrossFit games. When you’re doing CrossFit, you’re not like, Oh, I’m sweating, it’s too hard. It’s fucking CrossFit! My metaphor is Mount Everest — love is like climbing Mount Everest. It’s not for the faint-hearted. It’s a gladiator sport, and you’ve got to have grit and audacity and courage, and you have to have the ridiculous ability to manufacture faith from nothing. You have to manufacture faith not from the past or the status quo — because faith is not generated by extrapolating from the present moment or from the past. Faith is invoked by having the audacity to go into a future that is so true, good, and beautiful that you believe in it with no proof, and invoke it into being. That’s what you need to start a company — you have to Steve Jobs that shit out of nothing. And that’s what you need in a relationship. So what I teach my clients is how to manufacture faith in the moments of darkness — how to bootstrap a ladder out of hell when you’ve got nothing. Because that’s what you’re going to need as a parent, at moments.

And so it’s really: who’s worth the ROI? Who’s worth the suffering? That’s my least glamorous definition of love — who’s worth the suffering. Because it is suffering. And no fucker was worth the suffering until I met my husband — and he scrapes by by the skin of his teeth at times. And the suffering isn’t because they’re bad and wrong. The suffering is because they’re holding up a mirror to your magnificence and your madness, and you’re going to be forced to actualize against your shadow. The suffering is: I don’t want to go to the gym. Being in love is a gym. Make no mistake, it’s a workout. It’s a dojo. There might be a spa in the gym — so there’s a spa in the gym, but it’s not a spa. It’s a gym.

So I teach people how to work out — how to build their emotional muscles. In physical performance athletics, they judge your fitness by how quickly you recover from a wound, from an injury, from your heart beating fast. Being in love is emotional Olympic athletics, and your indicator of fitness is how quickly you recover from being angry, being sad, being scared, being overwhelmed. How quickly can you come back to grounded baseline? You’re an athlete.

Intuition Is Your Future Successful Self Whispering to You

[00:26:10]

Jordan: Okay, so let’s hang here for a second. There’s this thing that is embodied in you with zero paradox, but for other people it just breaks their brain. They’re like: okay, wait — I’m supposed to not settle, and get the most inspiring person I’ve ever met in my life, while at the same time not waiting to buy the best car till the last day of my life?

Annie: Yeah. It’s a multivariate analysis. The caliber of love you can have is in relationship to the level of consciousness and development you’ve mapped. I’m not saying someone’s in love and someone’s not in love — you can create love to the level that your consciousness can conjure. And so yes, it’s like juggling 20 million things. But so is being an adult and having a child, so you might as well practice.

But if you have a specific well, how do I calculate the ratio — is there an algorithm? — honestly, I think intuition can be trained. Intuition — you could say it’s highly astute pattern recognition. That’s cool if you’re a materialist and you want to be not woo-woo. But I think of intuition as your future successful self whispering to you what to do next. And I think it’s the cutting-edge technology of being a human, and we do well to harness it, hone it, and train it. Your intuition takes over from trying to calculate — well, I’m this old, and this person makes me happy this way. You have to let go of the calculation, the cognitive micromanaging, and surrender into the intuitive knowledge of your multidimensional being, which has already known the past, the present, and the future. It already knows who’s the father of your future children.

That’s one of the things I like to give women, by the way. They’re like, I don’t know if this is the one. And I’m like, do you want to be a mom? Yeah, I definitely want to be a mom. Good — tune in, meditate, ground yourself, connect with your future child, and ask them: who’s your daddy? Because your children already know who’s their daddy. Now, are you communing with that future child’s soul? I don’t know. Maybe it’s just your imagination. Doesn’t matter — it gives you access to a piece of your psyche that you weren’t in contact with. When you’re working with the psyche, the invisible mind, you have to use metaphor, you have to use thought experiments. I’m a big fan of using your own imagination to access data that normally isn’t available.

The Opposite of Dead Is Alive

[00:28:39]

Jordan: I love it. People are loving your quotes: The caliber of love you can have is relative to the level your consciousness can conjure. And, Love is like the CrossFit games — it’s fucking hard.

Annie: No one complains when they’re climbing Everest. Oh, I didn’t know — there’s bodies everywhere. You know what you’re getting into. And I want people to get — I want to disavow them of this delusion of happily-ever-after bullshit. Because the point of being in love is to maximize your aliveness.

I think of love as the white light of human emotion. When you shine white light through a glass prism, it breaks out into all the colors of the rainbow. When you shine love through a human heart, it breaks out into the full spectrum of all human emotions — from joy and ecstasy to nervousness, anxiety, depression, anger, rage, terror, despair, the whole thing. So to say I love you is to say: I’m willing to feel my full spectrum of emotions in order to be in this relationship, in service of my aliveness. But it also means I’m willing to hold space for you to feel all your feelings and not change, fix, fade, or project — your aliveness and my aliveness are going to be maximized in this relationship. So I want to shift the cultural source code on love from happily ever after to alive ever after. Because the opposite of dead is not happy. It’s alive.

Jordan: Alive ever after. And the thing you’re saying about graduation is so important. We have this really weird thing where we value length instead of quality, or something — like, what’s the experience you have during the time you have it?

Annie: I mean, going to Burning Man has taught me that everything’s ephemeral. You’re going to die, they’re going to die — everything’s ephemeral. So you’ve got to extract maximal moments of aliveness per square unit of consciousness as you go through reality. And I haven’t found a better way to do it than bringing your attention — directing your attention as best as you can — to what’s happening in your nervous system in the present moment. Which I’m not particularly good at. I do this maybe four out of ten on a good day, so I’m in no way saying I’ve mastered this. But whenever I’m stuck in overwhelm, fear, not sure what to do — if I can just remember one thing, come back to my breath, tune in to my body, a portal will open into possibility. And it never fails. But I mostly don’t remember that. I mostly don’t.

Jordan: How do you remind yourself?

Annie: I practice with small weights. Anytime I’m filling my water bottle, anytime I’m in an idle moment, I practice bringing my attention to my breath and my nervous system. So I’m doing it when everything’s easy — I’m just waiting for an email to send, I’m on hold on a call. I practice regulating my nervous system so it becomes a tool that’s in my pocket, ready to go in small situations — and then it’s on hand when I’m four out of ten triggered.

But sometimes I lose my shit, and then I remember: oh, let me take a breath. And the sooner I can do it after forgetting to do it, the learning curve shortens. So I’ll do it after I’ve lost my shit. Then I’ll do it in the middle of losing my shit, but I won’t have been able to stop it. Then I’ll take a breath and regulate right before I’m about to lose my shit, but I won’t be able to stop losing my shit. Then eventually there’s a choice point upstream where — oh, I know where that road goes — and I can make a choice between saying the thing or taking a breath. And eventually you learn to catch it before the amygdala hijack happens and the lizard is driving the plane.

Tension Happens Automatically, but Relaxation Has to Happen Consciously

[00:32:21]

Jordan: Yeah. It’s like that moment when I’m like: I shouldn’t yell, I’m going to make this worse — and I just do it, and I watch myself do it. And the next time I’m like, okay, I successfully didn’t do it, but now I’m still fucking pissed, and I later do it, and the I told you so. And it just keeps — I get better and better.

Annie: Well, there’s a more subtle pattern there that I just want to introduce. It’s not mainstream. And that is: you cannot regulate anyone else’s energy, emotions, thoughts, feelings, expectations, guilts, or shames that are in your space. A lot of times we are porous as children, and we pick up all kinds of stuff from our parents. And it came in so early that we shaped our identity around it. So the guilt we feel that overwhelms us, we think is ours. But it’s not. It’s actually squatting in our psychic real estate.

And the way I know I’m holding someone else’s energy — shoulds, ought-tos, expectations — is I start to feel overwhelmed. See, overwhelm is an indicator that you’re trying to process something that wasn’t generated by your nervous system. If I’m processing sadness that was generated by my nervous system, I can assimilate and integrate it. I can digest it, I can regulate it. You can always regulate what’s created by your nervous system. What you can’t regulate or process or integrate is other people’s guilt, other people’s shame — other people’s energies that we take on. And it’s a metaphor: we take it on.

So I’ve learned that when I’m in overwhelm — oh, I’m running someone else’s shoulds, someone else’s guilt, someone else’s energy. And I don’t need to know whose it is. I literally do a very simple process, my un-enmeshing process, where I just breathe in, calling all my bits back: Annie got triggered, scared — I scattered bits of myself, and I call them home. And I imagine little particles floating back into the top of my head with my in-breath. And with my out-breath: anything that doesn’t belong to me, any feelings that aren’t native to my nervous system, I give you permission to leave.

See, tension happens automatically, but relaxation has to happen consciously. So I consciously have to un-enmesh — by pulling my energy back from wherever it was, and then giving permission to whatever’s in me that doesn’t belong to me to go home to its owner. Every feeling knows its owner. You just have to give it permission to leave. And that has been a game changer. Because I used to try to regulate when I was frustrated with my husband, and no amount of regulation was helping. I was like, this is fucking not working. And it was because I was trying to regulate my mom’s guilt, or my husband’s anger that was in me — that he wasn’t feeling. See, any feeling that someone in your family is not feeling — that is, hanging out with the sensations of — floats around in the air and goes into the most local, porous, empathic nervous system nearby. And then they have to feel it.

Jordan: And when you’ve done a bunch of work being present and available and empathic, you’re actually just more susceptible to it.

Annie: And you have to build your autonomy and serenity so that you can be semi-porous, and be intentional about what you let in and what you don’t — like you do with your front door. That’s the developmental process of building a self that guards its barriers with intentionality — but not a wall.

Every Complaint Is a Request in Disguise

[00:35:29]

Jordan: I think people misunderstand defenses. We absolutely need them — we want to upgrade them, we want them to be better, not get rid of them.

Annie: Absolutely. Transcend means include and go beyond. And it’s not the defense that’s the problem, it’s the compulsion. A conscious, dynamically required defense in the moment is appropriate. It’s when a defense is coming out of a compulsion based on a wound from the past — not based on present-moment data — that you’re being puppeted by the defense pattern, rather than consciously defending yourself from something that’s appropriate. So it’s the habit of compulsive defensiveness that’s the problem, not the defensiveness.

Just like manipulation. Manipulation’s not a problem — every time I teach someone, I’m manipulating them for their greatness. It’s unconscious, compulsive manipulation that causes all the problems.

Jordan: Oh, let’s dive into this. Because I think manipulation, in the most neutral sense, is a thing that women on average are way better at than men.

Annie: Well — and just to be clear: manipulation — manu means hand. Every time you open a window, you’re manipulating it. So let’s just take any moralizing off of it.

Jordan: Exactly.

Annie: So manipulation is using your wits to create new realities. And when you say women are better at it — how I would phrase that differently is: we evolved. If we all believe in the evolutionary narrative, we have the lizard, we’ve got the limbic brain on top of that — the sort of monkey brain — and then there’s the neocortex. And this is totally heteronormative, totally stereotypical, but men tend to be more cognitive, intellectual — which is actually a systematized form of dissociation called masculinity. Okay? But women operate more at the emotional level. So when we try to influence reality, we’re influencing at the emotional level, which precedes the cognitive level, evolutionarily.

So if you’re trying to make a change in a human — especially resolve a fight or move a situation — you have to work in the order in which we evolved. The lizard has to be safe, the monkey’s feelings have to be validated, and then you can bring in the neocortex. But most people try to skip straight to that. And so women are like: no, I’m getting you at your lizard, then your monkey, and then — you know, a child doesn’t have an intellect yet, but emotionally attuning to a child and moving it and rocking it will calm the child down. No amount of logic and reason and explanations will ever calm a child down.

My husband made a picture once with an artist: a cowboy riding on the back of a chimpanzee that’s riding on the back of a Komodo dragon. And this is what we’re dealing with at all times. And you know, pound for pound, a chimp will take you down any time. So you’ve got to know what you’re dealing with. You’ve got to include the chimp and the lizard as you try to do your cowboy game.

Jordan: I think you’re one of the best people at chimping consciously — for people’s greatness, like you said, and for your husband and for y’all’s relationship. I love it, I admire it, I look up to that ability.

Annie: Yeah. But whether something’s good or not is one thing — then you have to be good at marketing it. Your product could be the best in the world, but we all know that marketing’s even more important. So how do you market the behavior change to the partner, or to the person? You can’t compromise their dignity or self-esteem, because then they’re just going to defend. So how do you align what you’re suggesting with their own incentives? Because people do things for their reasons, not your reasons. So you’ve got to get the vectors aligned, and that takes strategic intelligence. And you can only do that when you’re regulated.

So who you have to be to inspire and enroll someone into their next level of greatness is the next level of yourself. You have to transcend your own shadow in order to do that. And this is why relationships are these beautiful symmetrical ratchetings up. Who I have to be to inspire my husband to feel my pain and actually shift something — rather than bitching, complaining, whining, and shaming — is my next-level self. And that’s what it takes to inspire him to go to his next-level self. And so we ratchet each other up. You go first. You always go first. Because you’re a partner in a tango dance, and when you change your dance move, their dance move changes in accord. But you’ve got to be the leader. And most people don’t want to be the leader. They’re like, I’m waiting for you to change.

Jordan: Right. So okay — what about those husbands that are complaining about their wives just being bitchy, complaining, and nagging?

Annie: Well, I’d say something to both of them. I would say, first of all: every complaint is a request in disguise. So what is the request? What is the commitment behind the complaint? When someone’s complaining to me, if I can have my wits about me: I can see you’re very upset right now, and I know there must be something you’re committed to in me — some greatness that I’m not seeing. What is the greatness in me that you’re committed to? You force them to go from shamey, blamey, poor bedside manner into an inspirational invitation to your greatness.

I call it going from WTF to MLK. The WTF stance is: Did you forget the almond milk again? It’s got shame, blame, make-wrong — it’s basically got what the fuck laced through it. And I always want to shift and alchemize WTFs into what I call MLKs, which stands for Martin Luther King. If anybody had a reason to be what-the-fuck, it would be him. But he didn’t. He used his inspirational language to invite an entire nation up to their next level of greatness, and he aligned the incentives without any shame or blame. And that’s what’s available when we want to get our husband to do something.

I’ll ask the wife: is it working for you, the whining and complaining? Is it actually working? He might do it once or twice, and then he goes back to his own pattern, because there’s no endogenous motivation being generated. And so I tell people: you have to pick. Do you want to shunt your grumble and upset onto the person, or do you want a behavior change? You pick. You ain’t never getting both. So when you’re done complaining and you actually want a behavior change, come find me — I’ll tell you exactly how to get there, and it will become sustainable. And it’ll take more work. And guess what: you will have to emancipate yourself from your shadow in order to get there. Funny, that.

Jordan: Yeah. I was saying this with my friend and guest Hannah earlier — would you rather be right or happy? It’s kind of a translation of this.

Annie: But it’s even more: would you rather be upset, or get the thing you say you want?

Jordan: Yeah.

Annie: And what you realize is: they don’t want the thing. They want to be regulated. They want their upset, triggered, young, regressed self to get regulated by their partner — dressed up as a narrative called I just want you to remember to keep your word, or whatever it is. And people don’t trust you when you’re making a request from a triggered place. They just literally don’t trust you. So you have to wait till you’re untriggered.

Jordan: Because you’re not trustworthy.

Annie: Well — you’re not trustworthy. Only half your consciousness is online if your heart’s not open. I don’t trust anything anyone says if their heart’s not open. I just listen to the voice tone of any words coming towards me — including the voice in my head — and if the voice tone isn’t heart-open, I don’t swallow the words. I don’t believe it. I listen to the words, I can report on the words, but I don’t take them in.

You Fall in Love with Who You Get to Be Beside Them

[00:42:38]

Jordan: Okay, so we’ve got another five or ten minutes, and people must be just in rapt attention — I’m not getting new comments. There’s a million ways to take this, but: outside of love relationships, do the same principles apply? Do you have to market them differently? How does that work?

Annie: I think you have to market every single request you make in your life. You’re never done marketing. If I get a client and they’re like, Yeah, I want to find my soulmate — every single coaching session, I have to market: I know you want to find your soulmate, and that’s why observing this pattern is going to help you. You’re never done marketing, especially when you’re asking reality to go against entropy, or against the natural wiring of resisting un-squinting from our blind spots. A blind spot is where you’re squinting at data in order to maintain a particular self-concept. And so I’m asking someone to un-squint — I have to give them coping tools, I have to give them eyeglasses.

And, you know, I’m married to a marketer, so I’ve started to see everything as marketing. I don’t have it as something clandestine. I have marketing as having the strategic intelligence to make sure that what you’re offering — which is of high value to the person — is not blocked, is allowed in. It’s a seduction. Marketing is a seduction. I mean, I have to seduce my daughter into the bath, still. Okay? And you get creative — unless you want to go into force, which is coercion, which has a cost. The minute you use threat, withdrawal, punishment — anything risking the relationship — you may get your way in the moment: they take the shower, or they do the thing you want. But at a very steep cost, which is the erosion of trust in the relationship. They’re like paper cuts across the Us, and over time — like termites eating the foundation of a house — the relationship will crumble if you use force. And so I need to find a way to inspire someone. And that’s what marketing is.

Jordan: The one thing that’s kind of assumed in the way you talk about it, but is worth highlighting, is that this is actually good for them. Like, I know that my daughter is going to benefit by having a bath.

Annie: Yeah. And in romantic relationship, you hire your partner not because of them, so much. You don’t fall in love with another person. You fall in love with who you get to be beside them, through them, with them. You fall in love with the transformational portal to your greatness that they offer, whether you’re aware of it or not. And so I think of it as: you hire your partner to hold a vision for you that’s bigger than the one you can hold for yourself. So they’re like Michelangelo, and you’re like a block of marble. Michelangelo said he saw David inside the marble, and he just carved away everything that wasn’t David. So when your partner is trying to change you with a complaint, they’re actually trying to scrape off everything that is not you — your wound-driven strategies from childhood, your defense mechanisms, your coping patterns — to reveal the essence of who you actually are, which is what they fell in love with. They’re emancipating the angel from the marble.

And so you have to bring your block of marble to your partner and know that they’re going to carve you into greatness — but also laced with their wounding. So they will cut into you sometimes, and you’ll feel the ouch. And then you have to communicate that ouch without shame or blame, and then allow them to bring the Neosporin and the Band-Aids and clean up. There’s no way they’re going to carve it without any pain. But surrender to the Michelangelo, which is your partner — that’s their vision. It’s almost like you fall in love with your conscience. You fall in love with your underrepresented, marginalized values, and they show up in your partner. So they carve you into a more holistically integrated, balanced human. And if it goes right — which is what I’m standing for — you fall more in love with your self, your life, and the world. That’s the purpose of a relationship: to, net — not every moment, but net — fall more in love with yourself, your life, and the world. Any relationship that’s not doing that for you, net, is not helpful. So — I think I answered your question.

Jordan: Amazing. Okay, so we’ve got to follow up on something: treating all men as though I’m interviewing for a life partnership.

Annie: No — you’re treating all men as if they’re going to report on how they felt in your presence to your future soulmate. You’re not interviewing them, because I’m not interviewing a 12-year-old boy or an 80-year-old man. But imagine all masculinity is in a giant river, and data flows through it. You’re interacting with a man who’s an avatar of the divine masculine. When you interact with him at your highest caliber, the data flows into the noosphere and reaches all men, including your soulmate. And you want to be practicing how you interact with a man — any man — so that when you meet your man, you’re at the top of your game.

Selfing and Othering

[00:48:08]

Jordan: Yeah. And so — can you speak to how that relates to these compulsions to be pleasant, or to ignore when people aren’t being nice? Or for the woman to not set a good boundary, or stay in connection past when they feel respected?

Annie: Yeah. So every relationship that lasts long-term has two sacred polarities that come together. And it’s not male and female. It’s the sacred polarity of me — individuality, sovereignty, autonomy, separateness. The sacred polarity of me-hood, selfing. And always together with it is the sacred polarity of connection, communion, us — together, we, relationship. Me and we, selfing and othering. You need equal amounts. True love is equal parts integration and differentiation, and a relationship is like a living, breathing entity that breathes in together, breathes out apart. Equal breaths in and out; equal parts together and separate.

So two partners will come together guarding these sacred polarities — loosely connected to anxious and avoidant, but who wants to be anxious and avoidant? I don’t like those terms. So I think of them as sacred polarities that come together, in different genders sometimes. But you need both to cross-train, so that you cultivate your underdeveloped skill. Why? Because if you were to have a child one day, they need both of these to be integrated. A child needs to be intuited, because they can’t speak for the first five years. And they also need to see a parent who has a sovereign, autonomous self and isn’t engulfing the child. So you need both of these. You come together with your partner, and you’re fighting over me-ing and we-ing, selfing and othering.

And so for a woman, who tends to natively be more we-oriented: when I work with a woman, I am basically on a mission to bootstrap a titanium backbone out of the doormat-martyr game she’s been playing, and build a self. And I have tools for that — like, how do we self-ify someone? I mean, I had to do that for myself. I didn’t have a self when I met my husband. I didn’t even know what I wanted, didn’t know what I needed. And I hired the best selfer I could find to teach me. So he taught me how to empathize with my needs, and I taught him how to empathize with other people’s needs. That’s why they always come together.

So when I’m training women who are ready to find their partner, think of it as a number line, and there’s a zero in the middle, and then plus one, plus two, plus three — this is how self-y you are, all the way to very self-y: narcissist, sociopath, psychopath. Okay? And then on the other side of the zero is how codependent-empath you are: empathic, super-empathic, codependent, martyr, doormat, Charles Manson’s devotees. Okay — you get the two extremes. So however far you are from the center point is how far you’re going to attract someone on the other side. So I’m always trying to get my men and my women closer and more integrated to the center. Because if you’re an empath, you’re always going to fall in love with someone slightly narcy — that’s my pet term for narcissist. You’re always going to find a little bit of narcy, because you want to be like that — you’re hiring them to train you. But you want to be as close to the center as possible, so you’re just getting someone on this side.

So I’m basically training the woman to build her self-esteem, her dignity, her worthiness, her ability to cope. And I’m training the man — or whoever’s the more me-oriented person — how to read the implicit signals, read the unspoken, and attune and empathize with the other person’s experience by modeling something other than their own reality.

Closing

[00:51:40]

Jordan: Boom. Love it. Thank you, thank you, thank you. Woo-hoo! And we’re closing.

Annie: Yeah — I tried to cram as much value as I could in. Hopefully it was helpful for everyone.

Jordan: I think so. There was someone who said, I’m part of that rapt-attention crowd. There’s a lot here. I really appreciate you — there’s so much here, I love it. I feel like I just took a firehose of wisdom and —

Annie: Data compression. I’m into data compression.

Jordan: You’re very good at it.

Annie: All right — well, thanks for having me. I’m sure I’ll be back.

Jordan: Good.

Show Notes & References

Books

• Immunity to Change: How to Overcome It and Unlock the Potential in Yourself and Your Organization — Robert Kegan & Lisa Laskow Lahey (2009). Jordan connects Annie’s magic-pill exercise to Kegan and Lahey’s competing commitments framework — the conscious mind with a foot on the gas while a hidden commitment keeps a foot on the brake. Annie names the concept herself in the conversation.
• Existential Kink: Unmask Your Shadow and Embrace Your Power — Carolyn Elliott, PhD (2020). Jordan cites it in the same breath — another method for surfacing the unconscious payoff hidden inside the thing you say you don’t want.

People

• Annie Lalla — self-described Cartographer of Love; relationship coach for singles and couples, specializing in conflict resolution and long-term romantic partnership. annielalla.com
• Eben Pagan — entrepreneur and marketing teacher; Annie’s husband. He isn’t named on the call, but he is the husband throughout — the source of It doesn’t take a lot to be in love. It just takes everything, and the commissioner of the cowboy-on-a-chimpanzee-on-a-Komodo-dragon image. (Identification from Annie’s public bio.)
• Robert Kegan — Harvard developmental psychologist; co-author of Immunity to Change.
• Sigmund Freud — invoked for the conscious/unconscious mind distinction.
• Hannah Aline Taylor — Jordan’s earlier AMA guest, referenced in the would you rather be right or happy? exchange.
• Jordan Myska Allen — Founder & CEO of UpTrust; founder of The Relateful Company. uptrusting.com / relateful.com

Key Concepts

• Etymology of manipulate — from Latin manus, hand (via manipulus, a handful): to manipulate is literally to handle. This is the neutral sense Annie insists on before any moralizing.
• Triune brain (lizard / monkey / neocortex) — Paul MacLean’s model of the reptilian complex, limbic system, and neocortex. Contemporary neuroscience treats it as an oversimplification, but Annie uses it as a working order of operations: make the lizard safe, validate the monkey’s feelings, then bring in the neocortex.
• Amygdala hijack — term coined by Daniel Goleman in Emotional Intelligence (1995) for a fight-or-flight response that overrides the thinking brain before it can act.
• Noosphere — the sphere of mind enveloping the earth; concept developed by Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and Vladimir Vernadsky. Annie’s image of a shared field that your best interactions broadcast into.
• Landmark — Landmark Worldwide, the personal-development seminar company; shorthand here for the whole self-improvement circuit.
• The angel in the marble — the sculpting quote Annie attributes to Michelangelo (I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free) is widely attributed to him, though its documentary origin is uncertain.
• Would you rather be right or happy? — commonly attributed to A Course in Miracles; discussed at more length in the Hannah Taylor AMA.
• Anxious / avoidant attachment — from attachment theory (John Bowlby, Mary Ainsworth). Annie reframes the pair as the sacred polarities of selfing and othering, to be cross-trained rather than pathologized.

UpTrust is a trust infrastructure platform for the internet. Find it at uptrusting.com.

interpersonal-relationships
communication-and-conflict-resolution
mindfulness-and-spirituality