Podbit · Reimagining Love with Dr. Alexandra Solomon
When people think about what will be different this time, they almost always default to listing what their ex needs to change. Dr. Solomon closes that exit door: the only behaviors you can control are your own. Naming what you're committed to stopping — not what your ex should stop — is where real change starts.
Where this was said
At 34:20 · chapter starts 33:00
After the depth of the grief section, Question 4 is deliberately generative: it asks what has been gained, not what has been lost. Dr. Solomon opens with her signature maxim — love does not leave us where it finds us — and uses it to frame time apart not as a void but as a period of growth that can be examined and named. [1] — Dr. Alexandra Solomon "Love does not leave us where it finds us — we are changed by the experience of loving and being loved. The key question before reconciling …" 33:00 Concrete examples include setting better boundaries, knowing when to speak up, developing more self-compassion, becoming more realistic and less idealistic, and building routines and rituals that support personal wellbeing. The implicit message: if you can't answer this question with specifics, you may not yet be ready to try again.
Love does not leave us where it finds us — we are changed by the experience of loving and being loved. The key question before reconciling is not 'do I still have feelings?' but 'how have I actually changed?' Concrete evidence of growth is what separates a real version 2.0 from a replay of version 1.0.
Dr. Solomon invokes the aphorism that doing the same thing and expecting different results is insanity as the core challenge anyone faces when considering getting back with an ex.
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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