Podbit · Reimagining Love with Dr. Alexandra Solomon
Skipping grief doesn't eliminate it — it just re-routes it. Unprocessed grief from a breakup will travel directly into version 2.0 and resurface as anxiety, hypervigilance, or emotional flatness. You have to fully grieve the loss before you can show up whole for the reunion.
Where this was said
At 25:00 · chapter starts 20:55
Citing Feltman and Elliott's 2012 definition from the Encyclopedia of Sciences of Learning, Dr. Solomon breaks motivation into two buckets: approach (moving toward what you want) and avoidance (moving away from what you don't want). Approach sounds like 'I miss this person; I like who I am with them; I'm excited about what's possible.' Avoidance sounds like 'I need relief from grief; I fear they'll move on; I'm struggling in the relationship I started after we broke up.' [1] — Dr. Alexandra Solomon "Are you moving toward your ex or just running away from loneliness? Approach motivations — 'I miss this person, I like who I am with them' …" 20:50 Neither is simple or shameful, but they have very different durability as fuel for the long, slow process of reconciliation. The ideal state is one where a person genuinely feels they can be okay alone — so that rekindling feels like a free choice rather than a rescue operation.
Reconciliation driven by approach motivation (moving toward what you want) is more durable than avoidance motivation (escaping loneliness or grief), which only provides short-term relief.
Self-help fails because people are sold one universal cure by the hyper-responders who had a transformative result from it. The real problem is context: every method works for the right person at the right time, which is almost never you just because the author says so.
Spencer Greenberg was once so socially anxious his heart pounded just approaching a stranger. His therapist gave him homework: go to a bar alone, talk to 5 strangers. Starting with asking for the time, he worked up to asking men for hugs — and his anxiety fell dramatically in 6 months.
A person who flies regularly but obsessively checks weather forecasts before every flight is not doing exposure therapy — they're teaching their brain that flying is only safe with the ritual. Safety behaviors prevent the brain from ever learning that the feared thing is actually fine.
The worry-time technique assigns all worries to one scheduled slot (e.g. 5 PM). Every time a worry surfaces, you write it down and ban yourself from engaging with it until that time. When 5 PM arrives, most worries feel trivial and the act of batch-worrying exposes how little it actually accomplishes.
In a randomized study of 20 habit techniques, 'habit reflection' stood out: recall a past habit you successfully built, write down what helped you succeed, then apply those same strategies to your new habit. It works because it's self-adapting — it uses whatever worked for YOU.
The tiny habits technique — always having a minimal version of your habit you can do when life gets in the way — keeps the mental machinery of habit formation from breaking. Paradoxically, people given a tiny-habit fallback option were MORE successful at the full habit, not less.
Fears and worries act like playground bullies — they want to ambush you. But when you deliberately seek them out and choose the time of engagement, they lose their power. The volitional act of starting the fight on your own terms is one of CBT's most underappreciated insights.
Most downtime defaults are things you regret immediately after — phone scrolling, binge TV. 'Glad you did it' activities meet the same need for rest but leave you feeling like you spent your time well. The switch from a bad screen to a documentary, a book, or a walk costs almost no extra effort but compounds into identity over time.
You rarely control your first reactive thought. But you can train your second thought — the response to the trigger — by asking whether your initial reaction is the most helpful one and replacing it with something equally true but more constructive. Over time, that second thought becomes automatic.
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