Stephen Grosz - ‘Real love is going to hurt’

Summary

How To Fail With Elizabeth Day

Episode: Stephen Grosz – ‘Real love is going to hurt’
Date: October 8, 2025
Host: Elizabeth Day
Guest: Stephen Grosz, psychoanalyst and author

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Episode Overview

In this deeply insightful episode, Elizabeth Day is joined by renowned psychoanalyst and author Stephen Grosz to explore the transformative power of failure, especially within the context of love and personal growth. Drawing from more than 45 years of clinical experience and two acclaimed books—The Examined Life and Love’s Labour—Grosz delves into failure as a catalyst for self-understanding, authenticity, and genuine connection. Together, Day and Grosz discuss how unconscious scripts shape us, why denial can hinder healing, and the distinction between real and imitative love.

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Key Discussion Points

1. The Power of Unconscious Stories

[04:28–06:24]

• How Our Stories Shape Us: Grosz illustrates how people unconsciously internalize and repeat patterns associated with childhood suffering, impacting adulthood satisfaction.
• Attachment to Suffering: He shares an example of a patient more comfortable with misery due to familiarity:

  “There are things from their childhood which they will not remember...they find ways of spoiling what they have, and being unhappy...they have an attachment to suffering...it becomes safer than daring to be happy.” (Stephen Grosz, 05:13)

• Importance of Articulating the Narrative: Understanding and telling one’s story is the first step toward interrupting self-defeating cycles.

2. Denial and Self-Deception

[06:24–08:33]

• Denial as a Deflection: Denial manifests in offloading blame; patients often attribute failure to others, not themselves.
• The Analyst’s Role: Grosz tries to help patients see their part in failure, shifting from “the problem is in the other” to self-examination.

• “Denial is a refusal to...see oneself clearly and the world clearly. It's the insistence that the problem is over there in someone else, not in me.” (Stephen Grosz, 07:30)

3. Influence of Family and Early Trauma

[09:38–12:25]

• Holocaust Legacy: Grosz describes his immigrant family’s traumas—Holocaust survival, assimilation, and unspoken grief—and their indirect psychological impact on him.
• Motivation for Analysis: He reveals how unresolved familial experiences pushed him to want to make sense of his own and others’ stories.

• “I loved my parents, but I didn’t altogether trust them. Part of that was I had a birth defect...my parents thought if we talked about it, it would upset me. So we never talked about it.” (Stephen Grosz, 12:30)

4. The Three Failures:

a. Failure 1: To be a Psychoanalyst is to Fail Every Day

[15:14–23:46]

• Collaboration over Perfection: Grosz learned that analysis is not about omniscience, but two people “not knowing together.”
• Welcoming Mistakes:

  “the psychoanalysis is two people not knowing together. Both of us will make mistakes ...you get it wrong each day, but the other person intuits you're trying.” (Stephen Grosz, 16:14)

• Failure as Experience: Sometimes, patients want to witness the analyst fail, either as a test or to feel understood at an experiential level.
• Limits of Help: Even with best intentions, some analyses seem to fail or are incomplete; “you never know what that child is making use of or not making use of.” (Stephen Grosz, 20:44)

b. Failure 2: Mistaken Identity as a Writer

[33:22–37:50]

• Writing Like an Analyst vs. Like Himself: Grosz admits he initially hid behind psychoanalytic jargon, but personal experiences—falling in love, marriage, fatherhood, supportive friendships—helped him find his authentic voice.
• Fear as the Enemy of Writing:

  “Fear is the enemy of writing. I felt supported. I had a safety net...feeling held, loved...that made me feel, yeah, I can try this.” (Stephen Grosz, 33:51)

• Impact on Practice: Family life and vulnerability made him less austere and more open with clients.

c. Failure 3: Not Understanding the Difference Between Surrender and Submission

[42:13–49:54]

• Submission vs. Surrender: Submission is giving everything in hopes of being transformed by another’s love—a defense against truly letting go. Surrender is mutual, honest vulnerability.

• “Submission...is the belief that if I give you everything...you will love me back and...heal me...Of course, that deal is completely unrealizable and never works. Surrender...is that incredible feeling when two people meet...you can let go to this person and they let go to you.” (Stephen Grosz, 42:34)

• People-Pleasing as Defense: Performing love blocks genuine connection; real love requires risking true self-revelation.
• Remarriage Within Marriage: Many couples only fall in love “properly” after enduring failure and pain together:

  “Some of the best marriages I’ve seen are failed marriages that then there’s a kind of remarriage...if we are able to see clearly, we can really fall in love.” (Stephen Grosz, 47:26)

5. Change, Loss, and Growth

[29:28–32:23]

• Change is Built on Loss: Each stage of life requires letting go—of childhood, of parental ties, of visions of ourselves—to create space for what's new.

• “We love is built around loss. Loss is at the core of love.” (Stephen Grosz, 29:46)

• The Price of Love:

  “If you love someone, it doesn’t end well. It'll either end in divorce or death. Real love is gonna hurt because...at some point there will be loss.” (Stephen Grosz, 32:34)

6. The Value of Feeling Pain

[51:02–53:46]

• Embracing Heartbreak: Grieving loss is essential and a true barometer of the heart’s desires.

• “Those feelings are the most accurate and subtle instrument you have for knowing your heart...If you don't listen to those pains...you have no way of knowing what you desire.” (Stephen Grosz, 51:02)

• Self-Deception and Self-Knowledge: The work of analysis and personal reflection helps undo illusions about self and relationships.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On therapeutic failure:

  “To be a psychoanalyst is to fail every day.” (Stephen Grosz, 16:04)

• On relationships:

  “Some of the best marriages I’ve seen are failed marriages…” (Stephen Grosz, 47:26)

• On the reality of love:

  “If you love someone, it doesn’t end well. It’ll either end in divorce or death.” (Stephen Grosz, 32:34)

• On grief and heartbreak:

  “Those feelings are...the most accurate and subtle instrument you have for knowing your heart.” (Stephen Grosz, 51:02)

• On surrender vs. submission:

  “Submission or submissiveness is in fact a defense against surrender...when we are really genuinely surrendered to another person, we're back in the realm of accepting reality.” (Stephen Grosz, 44:03)

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Important Timestamps

• Understanding how stories shape us: 04:28–06:24
• Denial and self-deception: 06:24–08:33
• Trauma and family history: 09:38–12:25
• Failure as essential to psychoanalysis: 15:14–23:46
• Change, loss, and the price of love: 29:28–32:23
• The difference between surrender and submission: 42:13–49:54
• Embracing pain after a breakup: 51:02–53:46

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Tone and Atmosphere

The conversation is warm, nuanced, and reflective—filled with both vulnerability and intellectual rigor. Grosz is thoughtful and candid, often turning questions back on himself. Day’s admiration and openness foster a space for deep inquiry and shared emotion.

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Conclusion

This episode stands as a meditation on the necessity of failure—not just as a route to success, but as the very soil in which love, change, and self-understanding grow. Stephen Grosz, through personal and clinical wisdom, gives listeners permission to embrace pain, question their narratives, and recognize that, ultimately: “All our failures are failures in love.” (Elizabeth Day quoting Iris Murdoch, 54:16)

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Recommended Read:
Love’s Labour by Stephen Grosz
The Examined Life by Stephen Grosz

For anyone facing transition, heartbreak, or self-doubt, this episode offers sustenance and hope—a reminder that failure is not just survivable, but meaningful.

Transcript

[Stephen Grosz]

The husband may be legally married to the woman my patient, but he is properly married to alcohol. Some of the best marriages I've seen are failed marriages. In life, if you love someone, it doesn't end well. It'll either end in divorce or death.

[Elizabeth Day]

Welcome to how to Fail, the podcast that believes failure isn't the ending, it's the beginning of a new kind of understanding. This episode is brought to you by.

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[Elizabeth Day]

Stephen Gross is a practicing psychoanalyst who has worked with patients for more than 45 years. Born in America to immigrant parents who ran a grocery store in Chicago, by the age of 17 he had read Freud's the Interpretation of Dreams and in his words, was knocked out by it. He went on to study politics and psychology at the University of California, Berkeley and at Oxford, where he read PPE. His first book, the Examined Life was published in 2013 and caused a sensation, going straight to number one in the Sunday Times bestseller list. A book about learning how to live, it was one of the original Shelf Help titles, and hundreds of thousands of readers, including me, have taken it to their hearts. Now, 12 years on from his debut, Gross returns with Love's labor, which asks fundamental questions around how to love and be loved in return. Drawing on almost half a century of clinical expertise, Guo shows how love and sex shape ourselves and how our lives and histories shape our relationships. As ever, he communicates the nuance and power of his work by sharing stories which convey the very human vulnerabilities of both patient and analyst. Because, as he puts it, when we cannot find a way to tell our story, our story tells us. Stephen Gross, welcome to how to Fail.

[Stephen Grosz]

Thank you, Elizabeth. Wonderful introduction. Very moving.

[Elizabeth Day]

I'm so thrilled to have you here.

[Stephen Grosz]

I'm thrilled to be here.

[Elizabeth Day]

I'm a huge admirer of yours. And not only are you an exceptional writer and psychoanalyst, you're also so generous. And you turned up with a present for me and you turned up with a beautiful pen, which is now my favorite writing instrument. So thank you for that as well.

[Stephen Grosz]

You're welcome.

[Elizabeth Day]

But can you talk to us a little bit about an example of how a story might tell us?

[Stephen Grosz]

Oh, gosh, yes. When I think about patience and I think about ways in which people can get caught up, there are things from their childhood which they will not remember. Some people are born into families where there's a great deal of unhappiness. And throughout their life they may get a good job, they may get married, but they find ways of spoiling what they have, wrecking the job, wrecking the marriage, wrecking the relationships and being unhappy. And what you can find sometimes, like as an example of a storytelling them, is that they have an attachment to suffering. And the attachments link to that very early beginning where what they learn then becomes familiar to them and it becomes safer and more secure than daring to be happy. So they'll find themselves. I had someone recently who'd gone through a breakup and said, but in an odd way, I feel this is normal now, being miserable and on my own again, it feels sort of. And what she was saying was there's something about that which is so familiar, which is me, which is directing my life, and we can start talking about. But actually that's one of the problems which is most difficult to change when someone does have an attachment to suffering. But that's an example of where someone's unconscious is directing them. And if we can't get it into a story and start thinking about it, it would be there, say, throughout her entire life. I don't know if that's clear.

[Elizabeth Day]

It's totally clear, and it's fascinating. Talk to me a little bit about denial. And so moving on from that idea that unhappiness might be familiar and that therefore shapes the choices we do or don't make, how much does our denial of something that we secretly know to be true, but that we live our life trying to avoid, how much does that shape our story?

[Stephen Grosz]

I was thinking of denial when you said the word denial, immediately thought of failure. Because I was thinking, I think of you as sort of like the professor of theology, because this is. You talk to people all the time about this. In a way, when someone comes to see me for consultation, they usually begin with a failure. It's not unlike the podcast people begin with. My marriage is a failed marriage. My relationship to my parents has failed. I have a terrible relation to my children or to my body. I overeat. I do this at work. I do all these destructive things. But the first thing denial I think of is I'm listening, as I'm sure you listen and think, where do they place the cause? And most people, so many people come to my office. I had a man not that long ago tell me about his failed marriage. And I said, tell me, why do you think that is? And of course, in the next 35 minutes, he spoke about his wife, that the cause of the problem was her. It wasn't in him. So there was a denial about seeing himself clearly. A lot of the things in my new book, Loves labor, are about. It's really a book about trying to see clearly ourselves and our beloved. That's what it's about, that the aim of life is to see oneself clearly and the world clearly. And denial is a refusal to do that. It's the insistence that the problem is over there in someone else, not in me. The failure if I failed was because of them. And so the first job that I have to do, which is a little bit different than yours, is to kind of see if they can see some of themselves in that failure.

[Elizabeth Day]

Well, I adored your new book, and I adored your first book, and actually your first book, the Examined Life, came into my life when I was going through a major failure, which is when my first marriage was imploding. And interestingly, I started seeing a new therapist. And she said, why are you here? I said, I'm here because I'M doing ivf, and if it fails, I know I'll need some help with that. And she said, how's your marriage? I was like, it's totally fine. Absolutely fine. Absolutely a. Okay. But of course, she was doing a very clever thing, which was identifying, if you need to come and see a therapist about ivf, it means you're probably not getting that support spouse. And that therapeutic journey became the story of my divorce. And the examined life really helped me through that. Before we get onto your failures, I. I would love to touch on your own childhood. Yeah, it's a very specific experience. I imagine being raised by immigrant parents in Chicago. Grocery store. And your father had left Germany, is that right?

[Stephen Grosz]

Czechoslovakia. Czechoslovakia, which is. Well, it was Austria, Hungary. It was Czechoslovakia. It was then. It's now in the Ukraine, this little village. And. Yes, and a lot of art family was killed in the Holocaust. So he came just before the war, went into the US army, because people did that to become citizens at the time. And I think it was a very optimistic time. You met my mother, and I think they were very happy and felt that life was all in front of them, as so many people did in the states in the 50s and 60s.

[Elizabeth Day]

You've said in the past that when you mentioned the war or when it came up in conversation, he would sort of wander off rather than talk about it.

[Stephen Grosz]

Well, specifically, I think the Holocaust. I was raised with, for example, a cousin of ours who was in Auschwitz, who had a number on her arm, who was I saw very frequently. And there were members of my family. I went to a Hebrew school. And again, there were lots of Holocaust survivors there. And so who had a very ambivalent relationship to these American kids. I was born in the 50s, really, less than a decade after the war. And they will have seen us and thought we were spoiled. And, you know, they had an ambivalent relationship towards. I mean, they were very kind in one way, but they were also depressed and angry and have created all sorts of psychological problems. That cousin of mine who was a survivor, I think it was very hard. She had been in madness for so long. And I remembered something. She told me she saw a psychoanalyst in Chicago once a week for many years. And she said that he had said to her, you come here once a week to see me not because you are mad, but because you lived in a mad world. And I'm here to remind you that the feelings that you have are okay. And that's why we meet. So, you know, it can be different things. But it was you know, on the whole, in many ways, my childhood was, you know, quite happy with. In that.

[Elizabeth Day]

How moving. Do you. I'm so aware of doing a sort of cod job of psychoanalysis while speaking to one of the greatest psychoanalysts of all time. Do you feel that part of what has drawn you to this line of work is a responsibility to tell stories that otherwise are left untold or snuffed out? Is there that weight?

[Stephen Grosz]

It's very complicated, I think, to be honest. In the new book I mention a little bit, one of the things that I discovered, all analysts have to have an analysis. And one of the things that I discovered in my analysis is that I loved my parents, but I didn't altogether trust them. Part of that was I had a birth defect when I was born. I had to have surgery. And like here, I don't know if you know, but back in the 40s, 50s, 60s, children weren't allowed to be visited by their parents. Like a Great Ormond street or any of the children's hospitals. You could go once a week or on a Sunday afternoon, or often parents were allowed in the evening while the children were sleeping to look through a window. And that's how it was where I was in hospital too. So you. It breaks a deep, fundamental bond. It's traumatizing to the child. A lot of my colleagues too have had things in their life sent to boarding school or parents who are alcoholic or it's often trying to make sense of. My parents were loving, but I think they thought if we talked about it, it would upset me. So we never talked about it. And that is undoubtedly part of why I became an analyst. And I think a lot of my colleagues have things. They're generally curious. They want to know about why their childhood was the way it was, why it was shaped the way it was.

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[Elizabeth Day]

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[Elizabeth Day]

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[Elizabeth Day]

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[Elizabeth Day]

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[Stephen Grosz]

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[Elizabeth Day]

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[Elizabeth Day]

Let's get onto your failures.

[Stephen Grosz]

Right?

[Elizabeth Day]

And before we get onto them, I would love, with your permission, to quote your email to me where you write, these three failures are all in one way or another. Failures of seeing. Failing to see what psychoanalysis really is. Failing to recognize my own voice, failing to distinguish love from its imitation. These failures brought me embarrassment, unhappiness and pain. I wouldn't wish them away. Which really is the clarion call of this podcast.

[Stephen Grosz]

Yeah, it is. That's why I like your podcast so much, because it is, you know, sometimes it's interesting. I love watching them, I love listening to them. Because you see people trying to pull away from. You're gently taking them towards that.

[Elizabeth Day]

Your first failure is, as you put it, to be a psychoanalyst is to fail every day.

[Stephen Grosz]

Yes. I mean, to me, I believed when I started, and as I said, every analyst has to have their own psychoanalysis. I thought my analyst was, you know, x ray vision. He saw everything, he knew everything. You know, when I first went there, of course, what I learned was the exact opposite. The psychoanalysis is two people not knowing together. We. We have to figure it out together. And that means both of us will make mistakes and. And I will get it wrong. And that's why it's really important to help the patient that the atmosphere is warm, that it's nonjudgment. It's to encourage the patient also to correct me and to come back the next day or their next session and say, you're an idiot. What were you saying? That was completely wrong. And I welcome that because that has to happen, otherwise you can't get on to figuring it out. And it really is collaborative in that way. By the way, I also think love works like that, too, in certain ways. In love between a parent and a child or a couple or a colleague's friends, you get it wrong each day, but the other person intuits you're trying. And that's where they know the love is. They know that you're trying to figure out. You're trying to see clearly them and yourself and make sense of it. So in a way, being analysis that's just ongoing. There are some times when failure is an important feature. And I had a case not that long ago, a young girl who clearly wanted the analysis to fail. She's very entangled with her mother, eating disorder, wanted, so she wasn't turning up. Or when she did turn up, she was silent or she was aggressive. And it took a while to realize that the deal was with her mother would be that I would fail. And that that meant that she, the only person who could fix her was her mother and that she could stop therapy and just be with the mother. And once we saw that and could start putting words to that, it meant understanding that she was really sad about one of the things we have to do, by the way, when we love, which is to lose things, to let go of the parent, to make room for a new relationship. She did not want to do that. And so we could start talking about it. She could get sad. We could talk about the pain of growing up and the analysis could go forward and we could progress. Sometimes I had an experience not that long ago when, where a patient wants you to fail. Young people do this to see because they're perfectionists. So many young people are, and they want to see how you cope with failure. Do you. Oh my. You get upset or are you kind of more accepting of it and thinking realistically, well, I've done the best I can do. They want to see how you manage failure. And sometimes people, by the way, give you an experience of failure because they don't have the words to tell you how bad it feels. And they want you to feel a failure and know that you're failing and see you fail so they know you've had that experience. I saw someone, an adult, not that long ago, whose relationship with their parents was terrible almost from the beginning. And I think the parents were really disturbed, very, very disturbed. And this person made a wonderful life. But one of the things that came out in the analysis was I quite often felt I wasn't getting it. And eventually we arrived at a kind of view that she was giving me an experience of what it was like to be her as a child. She never could get her parents to feel what she was thinking, what she wanted. She just couldn't get through to them. And she was giving me an experience of that partly so I could, I realized, eventually empathize with her. And I said, I think you're giving me an experience of what it was like to be you with your parents. And she said, that's exactly what it was like being with my parents.

[Elizabeth Day]

And are there any clients who you feel that you've just had an abject failure with, that you haven't helped them in the way that you have striven to do?

[Stephen Grosz]

Yes. I mean, there are analyses which. Absolutely. That will happen. I don't know. Maybe I'm kidding myself sometimes, because I also think, you never know. One of my teachers, I was doing a child case, a very disturbed child. And I had a wonderful supervisor, distinguished child analyst. And I sang something. I was in my 30s. I said, this child doesn't hear anything I'm saying. We're not getting anywhere. There's a complete. And he said, you don't know what's going in. You do not know what that child is making use of or not making use of. And some of that comes through because I've had people where I felt the work was failing and analysis will end if the patient breaks it off or you end it for some reason, or the two of you agree, which is hopefully what happens. But sometimes a patient will stop. And I've had a patient abruptly stop, and I felt a terrible failure. And then six months or a year or two years later, they came back. And so you don't know sometimes, because sometimes people return and say, I got this from it. I didn't get this. I was very angry at that point in my life because.

[Elizabeth Day]

And you go on again as the analyst. Do you ever feel angry with a client or judgmental of a client?

[Stephen Grosz]

I do, of course. And it's not that you don't feel those things, but you then think about why you're feeling that thing. The patient that abruptly leaves wants you to be upset, you know, wants you to be shocked or angry. And you have to think about, huh, why do they want that? And oftentimes it's. They're furious with you that you're not giving them something or seeing something. And I have to interrogate myself or take my work to a colleague and say, what am I missing? And there's a lot of that in my work. Colleagues come to me with cases, peers. I take my work to other people and we discuss it and try and think through. But it would be odd not to have feelings. So if someone comes in and tells me they're boring and I find them incredibly interesting, that would be peculiar, you know, if they say, everyone tells you. And I. In my first book, there was a case of someone who I did find extraordinarily boring. I mean, and boredom's different than just being kind of sleepy or you're just. It. It was like being drugged. And it was kind of interesting because you realized it was. You know, in America, we say playing possum, you know, a being dead of, like, kind of. I realized that he was doing that as a defense. Possums literally do that so other animals don't attack them. He was doing something to make it so I didn't interact with him, that I couldn't get to him. It was his defense. So it's important to register. Oh, my gosh. And then to interrogate, why am I having this feeling? And make use of that.

[Elizabeth Day]

You also write In Love's labor about those unspoken unconscious signals that clients give you. So when they arrive, how they arrive, whether they're a few minutes late. The ballet dancer that you had who synchronized her movements to yours, I'd love you to talk a little bit about that, about what you notice.

[Stephen Grosz]

Yeah, I mean, I do all sorts of work, so I see some people once a week or twice a week. But a large body of my work is seeing people intensively four or five times a week. That's not for everyone, but it's appropriate for certain people. And some people, the more you see someone, the more you're aware of their habits. So there are people that arrive literally right at the dot of their session, and they come right in. You know, they buzz, I open the door, they come in, and they never have to wait in the waiting room. And there may be reasons for that that they can't bear. I worked at a forensic clinic, and that's what somebody did. He came right in. One minute after his session started. He came up the stairs to his room. And it turned out one of the things that he did was he would never wait in the queue at supermarkets. He would just steal what he wanted because he couldn't bear cues. So if he had something, he would just walk out with. There's people that. The ballet dancer was somebody I just began to notice. No matter how quickly or slowly I would walk to my chair and sit down. She would move across the room and sit down onto the couch at the same time. I sat down into my chair. I don't think she noticed. It wasn't conscious. You couldn't plan that. The guy who turns up one minute late or the people who turn up one minute early or. I think I Mentioned, a patient always closes the door. Another patient would always crack his knuckles before starting. He'd lay on the couch and then do that every day. If you put it in your diary, cracked knuckles, or you would not, you would get it wrong. But just one of the things that's borne in on you when you do the work that I do is the power of the unconscious. The. The intensity, the vehemence of how our lives are driven in a certain way by things we're not aware of. The ballerina, I think, felt our minds were in sync. If we could both sit down at that moment, there was a kind of mind meld. I could almost know what she was thinking. And we were closer if we were moving at the same moment together. And she'd had years of that, I mean, since she was a tiny girl doing ballet school. And she just sort of, I think, didn't even think about it as a thing. And one of the stories of my book was about a patient who's always 15 minutes late and slowly realizing that the missed part of the session actually was, in some ways, the most important part of the session, that there was quite a narrative about absence. And the story was, in a way, how with that patient, she had had an older sibling and had died and that the mother was still quite involved with. And she came to believe, I think, from birth, that what was not there was more thought about than what was there. And so she always gave me a chunk of each session when she wasn't there, because that's when I would be thinking about her as if I would be thinking about her more when we weren't together. So those things can have a powerful impact that we don't even realize.

[Elizabeth Day]

Yes, absolutely.

[Stephen Grosz]

In our relationships.

[Jonathan Van Ness]

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[Elizabeth Day]

This idea of change and loss being so embedded with each other. If someone is listening to this or watching this right now and they're in the grip of change or transition and they're fearful of it.

[Stephen Grosz]

Yes.

[Elizabeth Day]

What advice would you give them?

[Stephen Grosz]

Oh gosh. The thing about change is is important to me. We love is built around loss. Loss is at the core of love. So we're in the womb and we have to give up the womb to have the breast. We give up the breast to have solid food. We give up being at home in the kind of cozy, snuggly thing with mummy and family to go to nursery and reception. And at each stage of our life at 18, we will leave home to start work or go to university or whatever we're doing. At each stage we have to let go of something to have the new thing. And if we don't do that, we can't have the new thing. We have to make room for it. Some of the stories in the book are about our resistance to that. Some of them are external, our love of our parents. So the second story I think is about a girl who can't send her wedding invitations and she can't understand quite why she can't do that. That and that's about the anxiety of letting go of her Parents. I saw someone recently who was in their 70s, whose father in his 90s, was dying. And what was interesting about that was she and her husband were more children of her family then. They had never really made a family of their own. And the children that they had had were all sort of the children of her parents. Her attachment to them was paramount. And she had never given it up or reduced it in any way to make room for the marriage and her husband and his life and to build a new thing together. So the example you're bringing about someone who's finding it difficult. It is difficult. It's prob. The most difficult thing there is is accepting that loss. And it can be more complicated. It can be not just letting go of an external thing like our parents too. Sometimes we'll be in a marriage, we love our husband or wife, but we see an aspect of ourselves that we refuse to let go of. That we have to let go of if we're really going to have proper intimacy and surrender to our beloved. And if we don't do that, it's not going to happen. And people, again, those are aspects of ourselves sometimes people just refuse to let go of.

[Elizabeth Day]

Wow, that was so good.

[Stephen Grosz]

I totally understand.

[Elizabeth Day]

And also, it feels to me, as you're talking, that loss is inimical to love. Like loss is the price you pay.

[Stephen Grosz]

It's the ticket of admission. If you. In life, if you love someone, it doesn't end well. It'll either end in divorce or death. The deal is it doesn't. You know, it isn't like there's something.

[Elizabeth Day]

The title heading for the episode.

[Stephen Grosz]

It isn't like there's some sort of, you know, fudge on this. Real love is gonna hurt because you're gonna really love someone. And at some point there will be loss. And people do try to fudge. That's one of the obstacles, I think, to really deeply loving someone that I'm trying to write about in the book. So it's about those things that we do internally to avoid facing truths like that rather than kind of accepting them. And accepting them with our beloved can make us even closer.

[Elizabeth Day]

Well, talking of acceptance and being beloved brings us onto your second failure, which is that you wanted to write like a psychoanalyst rather than as yourself.

[Stephen Grosz]

Right.

[Elizabeth Day]

And you've Falling in love, I believe, and getting married was integral to helping that process along.

[Stephen Grosz]

It was. I married my wife when I was 50 and had children then for the first time. And there were a number of things that came together. There was that experience for the past 25 years, I've had breakfast twice a week with two friends at breakfast this morning, and they're both writers. One wrote for the New Yorker and one writes for newspapers here. And they were very encouraging for me to write. I also taught at ucl. I taught the University of London at University College, a course on the case history and writing for about 10 years. And all those things kind of came together and I think made me feel, I say in my acknowledgments, that fear is the enemy of writing. I think all of a sudden I felt two things. I felt supported. I had a safety net of people who'd read my stuff and say, it's wonderful having great first readers and people who look at things with being loved, having my children. But also, that was the other thing. My mother died, got cancer fairly young. My father had had a number of heart attacks by the time he was just past 50. And I thought I also had a motivation to write because I wanted my children to know what I was doing all day. So part of the first book, the Examined Life, came out of all of that. Up until then, I'd written articles like Analysts Write for the Journals and book group reviews and things that had a few readers. I didn't. It wasn't from the heart, but there was something about having that safety net feeling held, loved by my family and friends, their friendship, my students, encouragement, that made me feel, yeah, I can try this.

[Elizabeth Day]

Well, was there part of that that made you feel good enough as you were without having to perform, quote, unquote, perfectly?

[Stephen Grosz]

Yes, I think that's true.

[Elizabeth Day]

And your children were young when you wrote the Examined Life and now they must be.

[Stephen Grosz]

Yes, my son is 19, my daughter's 22.

[Elizabeth Day]

Have they read the Examined Life?

[Stephen Grosz]

Oh, yeah, they have. But, of course, at their age, I know nothing. I mean, they know everything and I know nothing.

[Elizabeth Day]

Well, they're perfectionists.

[Stephen Grosz]

They are, actually. They're very, very successful and very, very good at what they do, and they're very good students, enormously proud of them. But no, no, no, I don't want any psychoanalysis.

[Elizabeth Day]

Right.

[Stephen Grosz]

You know, and of course, in my own family, no analyst has any power with their own. With people, you know, I can't.

[Elizabeth Day]

So we've heard how being married and becoming a father changed your writing.

[Stephen Grosz]

Yes.

[Elizabeth Day]

Did it change the way you practice analysis?

[Stephen Grosz]

I think it did. One of my friends I had breakfast with said this, that the way I. I used to be very, very austere in the beginning. You know, there was a kind of, you know, when people came, you almost barely said hello because there was a kind of austerity, a radicalism to it. Like, you know why you're here. I know why you're here. There's the chair. Here's my chair. Speak. You know, it's. It's a kind of. And then I felt it's more letting them see that. I don't know. I think one of the things people like in my writing is I sometimes say I got it wrong. I made a mistake. I found myself envying my patient here or feeling jealous or feeling, you know, that. And I'm. Patients see it all anyway. They see a lot of that, and it's worthwhile then talking about it, too.

[Elizabeth Day]

So patients and children see it all.

[Stephen Grosz]

Absolutely. The best interpretations have been made by my children.

[Elizabeth Day]

They will say, yeah, you've been compared to Chekhov, who I know is one of your heroes, in no lesser publication than the New York Times. How important is success to you?

[Stephen Grosz]

It is important, but do you care.

[Elizabeth Day]

About being a bestseller?

[Stephen Grosz]

I have to tell you, when the Examined Life, it really surprised me. I mean, I found it really surprising. I had to give the stories that were about patients to patients to read, and they read them and they said, yes, it's fine. I think all of us expected it to, you know, kind of end up, like, in a little book in a. A specialty psychology bookstore or something. That it became so popular surprised them. The book was like things on Book of the Week, and hearing it on the radio or read Audible and things like that or the audio versions was surprising because I just didn't expect that at all. I did enjoy it. It was. It was wonderful in part, too, because you feel you're doing something and now other people know about it, and we know. Lots of people asked for analysis, asked for therapy, counseling, and things came out of the book, which was, to me, a wonderful, wonderful thing. If it helped people, that was great.

[Elizabeth Day]

Because one of the things that I struggle with, obviously a large part of my life's work is about failure and understanding it, and understanding it as something leads us to greater lessons about ourselves.

[Stephen Grosz]

Yes.

[Elizabeth Day]

And yet I also have this, I think, ego driven sort of esteem issue, which is about external recognition and validation and chart position or sales figures. And I. It's a constant battle, and I wish I could just let go of all of that.

[Stephen Grosz]

I'm not sure why you should feel it, because it means it matters to people. It means people care about it. They want to hear the podcast, they want to read what you write. So sometimes if you don't like somebody's writing or you don't like and they don't like what you're doing and they write a bad review. I think that's sort of good. As good as a good review from someone you really admire. And the person who said those nice things and the wonderful things in the New York Times is someone who I've just had huge admiration from. So I think that's important.

[Elizabeth Day]

But what if it's someone you admire who says something negative about you?

[Stephen Grosz]

Then I would really think about it.

[Elizabeth Day]

Okay.

[Stephen Grosz]

Yeah. And she said one or two things in the review that in the new book have changed. You know, I mean, they get through. If someone you admire said, you know, I think this could have been done differently. I I sit up and listen because they really care about the text. That's good.

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[Elizabeth Day]

Your final failure? Yes, this. This one left me absolutely breathless. It was so brilliant and opened up a whole new window into how I saw my past romantic life. And as you put it, you didn't understand the difference between surrender and submission, right? Please explain.

[Stephen Grosz]

When I was in my 30s, I went to have my training analysis and I didn't understand the difference submission is. I thought they were. Well, I thought I was in love and what I was doing was really something quite submissive, which is the belief that if I give you everything. If I adore you, if I love you, if I do all the things you want, and it comes from a place of love you start, it's not, you know, what you will do is you will love me back and that love is going to heal me and sort of transform me and it'll be wonderful. Of course, that deal is completely unrealizable and never works. And so over the years, a number of people have come to my consulting room who are bitter, aggrieved, angry, unsettled, and they don't know why they're giving everything to somebody. Surrender, on the other hand, is that kind of incredible feeling when two people meet and it's not white flag surrender, it's surrender, almost like in a spiritual sense of really feeling you found your home, that you can let go to this person and they let go to you. And the result is a feeling of acceptance, of intimacy, profound intimacy, love. And that's very, very different. Submission or submissiveness is in fact a defense against surrender. It's usually, I'll see it in someone who's frightened of completely letting themselves go to another person. And it's a kind of masquerade of love. And you'll hear it in a friend or somebody, I give him everything. I do this, I do that. But they, in doing that, they are in a way saying, I give all this, but it's not doing the transforming thing. He's not giving the magic thing back, which I need, which he couldn't do anyway, or she couldn't do anyway. And I think people get caught up in that when we are really genuinely surrendered to another person, we're back in the realm of accepting reality. And we realize we will lose them and they will lose us. And we're now loving properly, which is in time, we realize that life is finite, that we don't have forever with someone, and it's a different experience completely. That sort of submissiveness, you stay in the grievance and you're away from the feelings of real love for another person. It's very common defense against love, I think, against deep emotional surrender.

[Elizabeth Day]

I found this distinction so extraordinarily helpful.

[Stephen Grosz]

Right.

[Elizabeth Day]

Because I think I've been trying to reach for the language that you have just used.

[Stephen Grosz]

Right.

[Elizabeth Day]

Throughout my 20s and early 30s, I think I would have described it as people pleasing. Like that idea of, if I am the best possible partner that this person has ever been with, then they won't leave me.

[Stephen Grosz]

Yes, exactly.

[Elizabeth Day]

But you're so right that I.

[Stephen Grosz]

And they'll give you something too. They're going to give you the magic and you'll. It'll be a love that totally changes you. I have people, young people in their 20s come and they have a kind of checklist. The person does all this and they're now giving them everything. And they think that's going to work out. And of course it isn't, because what they're missing is that kind of deep connection of being able to let go internally and feel that the other person's let go to them.

[Elizabeth Day]

Yes. There's still a performative aspect to that.

[Stephen Grosz]

Performance is really a very good way of looking because it is to me, a kind of masquerade or a performance of love. It's interesting psychologically too. Is sometimes the defense against the thing looks exactly like the thing. So this person doing all this stuff, I'll give him everything. Your friends would have thought in your 20s. Oh, what a loving person Elizabeth is. She gives everything. What a wonderful. He's so lucky to have her. And in a way he was. But in a way neither of you were because it wasn't the right thing.

[Elizabeth Day]

And also he wouldn't have had me, actually. He wasn't getting me because I didn't know who that was. So I couldn't show up as her. And nor did I feel safe doing so.

[Stephen Grosz]

Yes. And that's usually what it's about, is we don't feel safe turning up as ourselves.

[Elizabeth Day]

I love how you talk about surrender being this ability to sink into true vulnerability because you feel safe and held. The way that you talk about it sounds like something that has to be built over time.

[Stephen Grosz]

It does. And actually interesting. I was thinking on the way over here today that failure is a part of that. I think some of the best marriages I've seen are failed marriages that then there's a kind of remarriage. They are legally married. And then they come to hate each other. I mean, really hate each other, which you have to do at some point. And then a patient of mine said a while ago, man said, I was telling her she was this and this. And I was thinking, she's awful. And then I thought, thought, God, but she's married to me. I am really awful. I am appalling. How does she put up with me? And he had started using the things we'd seen in analysis and was able to say, God, the woman is a saint for tolerating me because I'm so that when I say like remarriage, people can be legally married. But what I'm trying to get at is there's a kind of deep psychological marriage. My favorite films are all those Hollywood comedies of remarriage, Philadelphia's Story, Bringing Up Baby, the Lady Eve, all the black and whites rom coms of the 30s and 40s. They all begin with a marriage. For various legal reasons, you couldn't show people in bed unless they'd been married. So Hollywood quickly got them married.

[Elizabeth Day]

That's a great fact.

[Stephen Grosz]

Yeah. And then they got unmarried and then the wife's dating somebody else, but for some reason she has to go back to the first husband to get something and. And then they properly fall in love and are married at the end of the film. And those were hugely popular and I think they're hugely popular in part because they speak to something. The podcast gets at your stuff, which is we're in a marriage. It fails. It really fails. And then if we are able to see clearly, we can really fall in love. They are all films where you feel at the end, they are now finally with the right person who wasn't the right person at the beginning. And they do the thing you say it of feel safe enough because they've been through all this to show their true selves and to be really close.

[Elizabeth Day]

Because you can still be in relationship with a relationship even if it's ended.

[Stephen Grosz]

You can, and in some couples, I don't think, end the difference between a legal marriage and a psychological marriage. It's not uncommon for me in my consulting room to have somebody whose husband or wife is addicted to alcohol. The husband may be legally married to the woman, my patient, but he is properly married to alcohol. It consoles him, it soothes him. It is the thing which takes care of him. It is to what he turns. He doesn't turn to my patient, who is his legal wife. A proper marriage is that thing which I'm trying to get at, which is something deep and psychological, which involves things like surrender and this kind of very deep attachment.

[Elizabeth Day]

If anyone is listening or watching this right now and they're going through a divorce or a breakup and they are grieving the thing that they thought they had, and they are terrified what lies ahead and whether they'll ever be happiness ahead or whatever love that is worthy of them, what would you say?

[Stephen Grosz]

Oh, gosh. I mean, in a way, it would be odd not to grieve. Of course they're going to suffer. One of the first things I say in the book was when I was 31, I didn't understand pain. I thought pain was, you know, and the ordinary Pains of love. When we fall in love, our anxiety, we worry about that. We then feel longing for someone. We can feel longing, we can feel anxiety. And then inevitably there is grief. I thought these were things to be removed, symptoms. You kind of. Could we avoid these? Is there a medication? Is there something to do? And in fact, what I try to show my book is those feelings are the most accurate and subtle instrument you have for knowing your heart. If you don't listen to those pains and you're suffering, you have no way of knowing what you desire. So I've had people in my office who are going through a breakup and they're suffering and sad in some ways, but if they're really listening, they're relieved too. They're getting. Something is ending. They can sense, oh my gosh, the world's opening up. I have now the possibility of letting go of this, the loss of this and the possibility of really being properly loved, of properly surrendering to someone. If someone's going through a breakup, there are all sorts of things. It's really to the medicine of psychoanalysis, the medicine of what I do is not in a way so much helping as understanding. If you can begin the work of thinking about why am I upset and what am I upset about? I might be upset about my children, I might worry for them, or I might worry for my elderly parents are going to make of this and they're going to worry about me or various things for myself, I'm relieved. Or you might start noticing all sorts of feelings. I'd be trying to help the person to think about the nature of their suffering. Because if you can really penetrate that, you really begin to get a sense of your heart and your feelings. And if the marriage is coming to an end, my intuition is that there was something not working on both sides. It's rarely that one person was happy and the other person was. There's something not right and there can be. And one of the themes of the book is that we do deceive ourselves, but we also have the great power to undo self deception.

[Elizabeth Day]

Stephen Gross, it has been such a privilege being in your company. It hasn't felt like long enough.

[Stephen Grosz]

No, it hasn't. I've really enjoyed being here.

[Elizabeth Day]

Thank you.

[Stephen Grosz]

It's wonderful talking with you.

[Elizabeth Day]

It means so much to me. You are the poet laureate of human emotion and actually the advice that I would add to that listener or that viewer who's going through heartbreak is to reach for your book Love's Labour by Stephen Gross. It is what you need and you start the book with a quote from Iris Murdoch. Remember that all our failures are ultimately failures in love. Thank you so much.

[Stephen Grosz]

Thank you, Elizabeth. I really love being here.

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[Elizabeth Day]

You get your podcasts.

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[Elizabeth Day]

Thank you so much for listening.

[Stephen Grosz]

And Doug, here we have the Limu Emu in its natural habitat, helping people customize their car insurance and save hundreds with Liberty Mutual. Fascinating. It's accompanied by his natural ally, Doug. Limu is that guy with the binoculars watching us. Cut the camera. They see us. Only pay for what you [e-mail] Savings Ferry unwritten by Liberty Mutual Insurance Company and affiliates. Excludes Massachusetts.