Ep #10: Unconditional Love vs Conditional Love

Super curious why my weight loss program is called Love Yourself Thin? Not sure what that even means? Don’t wonder any longer. This episode not only will explain why my program is called that, but I will help you understand what kind of love relationship you’re having and what kind of effects it’s having on your life. Alright, are you ready? Let’s dive in.

I am Dara Tomasson, and this is Weight Loss for Quilters episode 10. Did you know you could lose weight and keep it off for good? After 25 years of hiding behind my quilts, I have finally cracked the code for permanent weight loss and I’ve lost 50 pounds without exercise or counting calories. I’m Dara Tomasson, professional quilter turned weight and life coach, where I help quilters just like you create a life they love by losing weight and keeping it off for good. Let’s jump into today’s episode.

Before we dive into this episode I have got to share some of these amazing reviews. I love it. This is from Claudia Quilt Walker. She says, “I am an anxiety eater. This podcast made a lot of sense in the fact that I need to get past the drama and think clearly. Thank you.” And here is another one. This is from Dat Family Life. “Dara is such an incredible teacher. I love her little stories and relatable content that has helped me lose 10 pounds in a month. So amazing that I can learn while quilting.” Oh, my goodness, that is incredible, 10 pounds just by listening to my podcast. I love it.

I’m going to share one more. This is a five star review from HASC64. She says, “Dara does a wonderful new podcast. She is so easy to listen to as I’m working. The content is just what I need to reaffirm that we are learning in her Love Yourself Thin program. If I miss something she says or need to replay, relisten, it’s so doable. I’ve never done podcasts before, this is so easy.”

Oh, my goodness, these are incredible reviews, and I would love you to go and listen to the episode and share it as I know it helps so many people. It also helps with the algorithm of how podcasts are. And so, the more people podcast – review the podcast, the higher it shows in people’s views, and they can find me. Alright, so thank you for that.

Okay, let’s talk about unconditional and conditional love especially as it has to do with weight loss. This discovery in my brain was such a huge transformation for me in my ability to lose the weight and keep it off permanently. And so, what you can expect in this episode is I’m going to help you understand the difference between unconditional love and conditional love. You are going to learn how to be liberated not only in the relationship you have with yourself, but in the relationship you have with everybody else.

Also including relationship with food, with your house, and other external circumstances that often feel very overwhelming and challenging. We are going to explain the classic when I’m this then I can feel a certain way. So again, get ready because this episode truly can help you change your relationship in such a profound way that just like the review I read, you will lose weight just by listening to this episode. So, there are a lot of different ways of describing the difference between unconditional love and conditional love.

One of the ways that I saw that I like, Donald Miller said, “No love is conditional. If love is conditional it’s just some sort of manipulation masquerading as love.” So, as I describe the difference, so conditional love only when or if other satisfies our needs and fulfils our desires. Willing to pull away our connection under certain circumstances. Conditional love can be selfish, rooted in ego, seeks control, has expectations, judgmental, looks for another to complete them, feels threatened, needy or jealous.

Whereas conditional love does not depend on the loved one meeting certain expectations or desires. No matter what you do I’m going to pursue the goal of connection with you. Unconditional love is selfless, it’s rooted in soul, it seeks freedom, there’s no expectations, it’s non-judgmental, you’re already whole and complete, it needs nothing, it’s secure with yourself.

So, as I’m reading these lists, let’s just ask the first question, where do you fall in your love for yourself? Is it conditional? So, when I’m of a certain weight, then I feel acceptable? When I have a certain amount of quilts in a quilt shop, or when I have a certain number of awards for my quilts, when my kids do a certain thing? Or is it, it doesn’t matter how much I weigh, my worth doesn’t change? I really want you to think about that. What about in your relationship with others, how is that?

So, when we talk about unconditional love versus conditional love, I want you to think about this relationship you have with yourself literally is the ultimate form of self-care. So, when we can nurture a relationship with ourselves, this is when we can have this ultimate self-care that we need so desperately. So how do you do that? I’m going to share a personal story of when this understanding of unconditional love and conditional love really hit me hard.

Now, as a child, and we talked about this in previous episodes, especially in the perfectionism episode, people say words to us and we interpret them in different ways. So, when my mom would say, “You didn’t do a good enough job.” I would interpret that as meaning I wasn’t good enough. And so, what that did was it created a very conditional relationship with myself. So, I heard what she said, and really my mom was literally just trying to be the best mom ever.

She was like, “This is a good enough job, this is not a good enough job. This is how to improve, this is what you need to do to do better.” Whereas I understood it as I’m not good enough, I am subpar. I need to do more things. When I do more, then I can be more, and then I can finally allow myself to love myself. So, it’s a very innocent problem so many of us have. One of the things that’s so interesting is if we don’t learn to think about our thinking, our default thinking really is like we’re eight years old again, or 10 years old, or 12.

Because if we haven’t evolved our processes we are literally solving problems, and answering things, and doing things as we would when we were, eight, nine, 10, 11, 12 years old. So that’s why if we have a temper tantrum, it’s because we haven’t evolved our thought process past eight. So interesting.

I was taking a money course from my business coach. And she was talking about the relationship we have with money. And as she was talking about this relationship with money, it completely dawned on me that I had a very conditional relationship with my weight, with my self-worth, with so many things. And I started labelling all the conditions that I had. So, my house had to be perfect, my kitchen, the kind of car I drove, how stylish my house was, my outfits, my weight. All of those things had to be in check in order for me to give myself permission to feel acceptable.

And I want you to really think about that in terms of unconditional love versus conditional love. And then it was such a huge contrast to me when I thought about the way I feel about my children. So, my kids could come in the house full of mud, messy rooms, they would do the dishes and they wouldn’t do a very good job, but I never kicked them out of the house. I never quit being their mom. I never gave up on them. I never quit on them. It was so interesting to me when I reframed it this way. I unconditionally love my children. They can do all sorts of crazy things.

I had one child in particular who was drawing on walls when we had our house listed. And he liked sharp knives and so I had to change the way our kitchen was, and the way I cooked, and all of that. He wasn’t very good at safety so I constantly had to hold his hand. And he would never be the kid that could walk down the street with you. You had to have either in a body harness, or in a stroller, or in your hand. He just was very – he had no self-preservation, but I never quit on him.

I always made sure he was safe, and when he did crazy things, I would just take care of him. And I would just keep loving him. And so, I really want you to think about that in terms of how you take care of yourself. How you think about yourself. So, let’s just take weight since this is the weight loss podcast for quilters. What are your current thoughts about your weight? So, what are your thoughts about your weight right now? And how would you describe your relationship with yourself? Would you say you’re acceptable? Would you say you are good enough? Would you say it’s okay? What is your inclination?

Now, I know I’ve shared this in past podcasts but it’s so important to bring it to light again. When I was losing weight, and I was working with a life coach and I was learning these tools that I’m sharing on the podcast, and I started to change the way I spoke to myself. I started being more kind to myself. I started being more forgiving of myself. I started being more understanding and compassionate, and less judgmental.

Kind of like the description words here of unconditional, selfless, rooted in soul, seeks freedom, not expectations, not judgmental, already whole and complete, doesn’t worry, needs nothing, secure with self. When I started having those ways of thinking about myself, I wasn’t overeating, I wasn’t overspending, I wasn’t over negative self-talking. I had so much more capacity to think about my life and to be more happy.

And so, when I was able to be at 170 pounds, which my wedding weight was 164. I was so thrilled with what I had accomplished that now I used so much of my brain juice, I call it, the amount of energy I have every day to focusing on just enjoying my life. And I no longer had the hang-up of when I weigh a certain amount then I can be happy. And this is what I see with so many women, they say, “When I get to a certain weight”, let’s say your goal was 140 pounds, “When I get to 140 pounds, then I can start living my life.”

But the problem is these women use a lot of negative self-talk, you use really deprivation, a lot of really strict eating, denying yourself, punishment. You’re really using a lot of negative conditional type behaviors to get to that certain number on the scale. And so, you get to that scale, so many of us are okay with losing the weight, because we think that once we get to that number then everything’s going to be rainbows and daisies, but that is not the case. And so, you think, well it was terrible getting to this weight, and then now you’re only searching for the joy from the food, and not from yourself.

And I want you to think about why this happens. It’s because we’ve built this conditional relationship with ourselves saying, “When I have this weight, I can feel acceptable.” It’s like when I was a school teacher, we used to say, be really mean to the students until the six weeks of school so that they have the fear of you in them, which of course is not the most appropriate way. But I feel like so many of us do that. And I really want you to get curious and honest with yourself if that’s the kind of relationship you have.

So, I’m going to give you an example not weight related but along the same thing. So, during my 20 years of marriage, we have lived, I think in nine houses. And of all those houses we have re-renovated our kitchen, except for one or two. I only lived there for a short period of time. So, we’ve done a lot of kitchen renovations because in my mind I couldn’t feel relaxed or calm in my life without a nice kitchen.

And we have now lived in this house for four and a half years, and it is probably the most wonky kitchen I’ve ever had. And in order for me to have the kitchen that I really want we need to spend about 75,000 to 100,000 to build an addition onto our house to create the ultimate kitchen that would truly bring my joy. Now, the problem with that is that is a really long time for me to wait, four and a half years. And we hopefully will get the kitchen by the end of December actually, fingers crossed, of 2021.

So, I had to heal my relationship with this wonky kitchen. Now, remember I couldn’t do anything about it. There is just FYI so you can have a visual, you know when people have a pop-out for their kitchen dining room table? They decided instead of having the pop-out for the dining room table, to put the kitchen in there. So, it’s this kind of weird U shape, but then they added the island at an angle so it kind of is more like a C. Where you’re kind of trapped in the kitchen and I have five children and a husband, so it’s like ping pong within the kitchen, it’s really kind of challenging.

Anyways, I digress. And so, what I had to do was I had to heal my relationship with my kitchen because I knew I needed to save the money in order to pay for the kitchen. So, this is what it looked like. I said, “Okay wonky kitchen, you’re kind of funny.” We can’t open the dishwasher and open the drawers to put the dishes away. That kind of funny. At first I was disgusted, and then I went to kind of funny, and then I got kind of curious. And then I kind of got neutral, I’m like, “Yeah, this is just the way that they built the kitchen.”

And then it went to appreciation. Because even though the kitchen’s kind of funky and even though it kind of corrals us in, we kind of get bumped around in there. Before the pandemic I could have 50 people over for dinner, and my kitchen totally worked. It’s clean. It has a ceiling. It’s dry. It has running water. The appliances mostly work. I do kind of have a leaky fridge because my son would step on the bottom of it and he broke the seal. So, it still works, but we have water we have to sop up every once in a while.

And so, I started to appreciate that I had this beautiful, dry, functional kitchen that I could provide for my family. I could teach my children how to cook. I could host big dinners, and have parties, and have all sorts of people over. And so that’s how I was able to solve it. So, coming back to this topic of unconditional love versus conditional love. I want you to think about how could you heal your relationship with yourself in loving yourself?

Now, my program is called Love Yourself Thin. Because as you learn to truly love yourself, as you learn to value yourself, as you learn to appreciate yourself, as you learn to acknowledge the good things about yourself, and acknowledge the bad things, and just realize that that’s just part of being a human. Then once you have that loving type relationship, you can then learn to treat yourself with so much more patience, with so much more kindness, with so much more grace and understanding. And as you do that you then automatically start taking care of yourself so much better.

So going back to the child who comes in the house with muddy shoes. You love that child unconditionally so you don’t kick him out. And that is what I’m offering for you to do for yourself. Now, there was an insight that I wanted to share about changing your relationship. So, one of the beliefs that I had was that my mom only loved me conditionally. She only loved me if I looked a certain way, if I had cleaned my room a certain way, if I scored a certain number on tests, if I finished university.

I truly felt like she had all these conditions for me, and if I didn’t meet those conditions that I didn’t feel like I was loved. And what I want to offer to you was that the way that I looked at the relationship with my mom was what was conditional. So, because I thought that that is the way that I was able to get love from my mom, I created a conditional relationship with my mom.

And it wasn’t until I started doing this work and started opening up my mind that I realized that I’m the one who puts conditions on relationships. And that my mom always unconditionally loved me. But it was the lens that I was looking under. So, I know that I’ve talked about this in past podcasts.

And I’ll remind you of the red glasses that we can put on as quilters to see if the design of our quilt is well balanced. Because if we had that red lens, or if we take a picture of our quilt and put, like I said, black and white, or tone on tone, or whatever that filter of the camera, we are then able to see it differently. And this is what I want to offer you. So just like I didn’t have to change my kitchen, I didn’t have to change my mother, I didn’t have to change my body. I literally could start unconditionally loving it.

So, I want to challenge each and every one of you to think about what lens you are looking at the relationships you have with yourself and with others. And I want to encourage you to use the filters, re-use the definitions that I shared about the difference between conditional and unconditional love on this podcast, and then record what’s going on for you.

So, I want to leave with something very bold, and it might jar you a little bit, and that’s okay because that’s how we’re going to get some learning. You created the problems that you have in your life. You’re the one who created them. And so, using these tools, listening to this podcast, you are now getting the tools to solve the problems that you created for yourself. So, if you weigh more than your body naturally wants to be, you did that yourself. And so, if you want to solve it, I encourage you to start using these tools to change it.

So, thank your listening to Weight Loss for Quilters. If you want more information please visit me at daratomasson.com. See you next week.

To celebrate the launch of the show, I’m going to be giving away $100 gift cards to Lisa Bongean’s Primitive Gathering shop to four lucky listeners who follow, rate and review the podcast. It doesn’t have to be a five-star review, although I sure hope you love the podcast.

My goal for this show is to provide you with tons of value. So please let me know in your review if there’s a topic you’d like me to cover. Visit daratomasson.com/podcastlaunch to learn more about the contest and how to enter. I’ll be announcing the winners on the show in an upcoming episode.

Thanks for listening to Weight Loss for Quilters. If you want more info, please visit daratomasson.com. See you next week.