A lot of philosophy and psychology says that if you want someone else to change, you should first begin with yourself. There’s a great deal of wisdom and insight into us beginning with ourselves, but ultimately we don’t just know ourselves in a vacuum, we have to enter into community, into relationships.

At the same time, there’s a lot of self-improvement ideologies that say we shouldn’t listen to others because it’s always about them. How can we discern the difference between when we should listen to ourselves and when we should listen to the feedback of others? 

Tara Blair Ball opens up about what went wrong in her first marriage, how challenging it was to be so vulnerable in writing about it in her memoir, The Beginning of the End.

She discusses how to get out of a toxic relationship, and gives her best advice for personal growth and the development of self-knowledge. She also offers a course on how to break free from your own toxicity.

Time Stamps:

2:24 the interplay between instinct and instruction in relationships

7:22 Tara shares her experience about finding herself in a toxic relationship, how she handled the situation and how she grew to take radical responsibility for her choices. 

13:05 we identify a toxic person in a relationship but ignore the fact that healthy people do not date and stay with unhealthy people 

13:38 unhealthy people and their behaviors are more likely to drag us down, then we are to bring them up. 

17:40 the 4 step process -awareness, acceptance, action and application 

22:02 it has to be a balance between recognizing our own self awareness and what we need while also taking into account what we get from others

23:52 Solomon’s paradox

27:39 dealing with grief in the process 

30:27 a big part of being able to change a story is to acknowledge that we have the power to write it to being with

34:42 the practices that keep you connected to yourself 

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