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Hey there and welcome back to Behind the Line. I’m your host Lindsay Faas. If you are new to Behind the Line, what you should know about me is that I am a clinical counsellor specializing in trauma therapy, and after over a decade working with First Responders and Front Line Workers around issues like burnout, compassion fatigue, PTSD and related OSI’s, I have become a passionate wellness advocate and educator for those who sacrifice so much for our communities out on the front lines. Behind the Line is a place for us to talk about the real life behind the scenes challenges facing you on the front lines. I created this podcast with the hope of bringing easy access to skills for wellness – allowing you to find greater sustainability, both on the job and off. While you are listening, please take a moment and rate and review Behind the Line on apple podcast. Your support and feedback goes a long way in making this resource more visible to others who work in First Response and Front Line Work. Thanks so much for your help and support! Welcome back here friends, and I hope that this episode finds you feeling ready for the upcoming holiday season. I can’t believe how fast this year has gone by, truly time does seem like it speeds up. This season is a bit hectic in the lives of me and my family, but within it, I am looking forward to some cozy time at home with nowhere to go and nothing in particular to do…watching holiday movies and enjoying couch cuddles. I know that many of you are likely in the same boat of having a lot going on or working through the holidays, but I hope that you find some spaces for quiet and connection in the midst of it. Today, and for our December episodes, I want to use this time to offer you a holiday gift. Now, it isn’t something tangible you can hold in your hands, but my hope is that these couple of episodes will offer you a gift that keeps on giving to you and to the people in your life, all year long. Have you heard of love languages? Some of you may be really familiar with the concept of love languages, for others this might be a new concept. I’ll do my best to keep the recap of the basics short and sweet, because what I really want to dive into is a fresh way to think about love languages and to apply this awesome tool to your life. In 1992, author Gary Chapman wrote a book called The 5 Love Languages: How to Express Heartfelt Commitment to Your Mate. In it he shares about 5 distinct “languages” that people use to communicate and receive love. The fundamental concept is pretty simple – essentially all people value some amount of each of the 5 love languages, but tend to be predisposed toward more highly valuing one or a couple as most meaningfully communicating love. The use of “language” as the reference point is really great because he suggests that it’s kind of like learning a language. People can pick up new languages. We can learn to comprehend and speak in a new language, to varying degrees of fluency depending on our investment in practicing and immersing ourselves in it. But even when you learn new languages, you will have a mother-tongue that will always be easiest, that just feels most natural, and will be what your brain thinks in and what it routes through. Much the same way, people can find meaning in all 5 love languages, and can work to practice and refine skill in new languages, but they will also tend to have one that serves as the mother-tongue, in which they most naturally and easily communicate love to others and receive love from others. Originally Gary wrote his first Love Languages book for couples, outlining how we can assess our own love languages preferences, as well as those of our partner, to be able to communicate love to each other more skillfully and effectively. He later wrote several other books related to the same foundational premise, including love languages for kids, for singles, and in the workplace among others. The concept holds true to all human relationships – each of us have preferred ways, mother-tongues, of how we most meaningfully hear and connect with feeling loved or appreciated or valued. And often, my preferences may not mesh with my partner’s or my kids, or my friends…and so I have to work at learning their language to be able to show up for them to display love in ways that really impact them. Much like if I cared about someone who only spoke Spanish – I would try to learn their language to be able to connect with them, and they would try to learn some English to connect with me, and those efforts in and of themselves would be a demonstration of care as we step out of our comfort zones and do something hard yet so deeply meaningful. The 5 love languages include: Words of Affirmation, Quality Time, Receiving Gifts, Acts of Service, and Physical Touch. Again, all people have some amount of valuing bits and pieces from each of these, but will also tend to have one or two that mean a heck of a lot more to them, where love really “sinks in” for them, compared to the others. If you are new to the idea of love languages and want to explore this concept further, I highly recommend the book, but if you aren’t prepared to invest in reading it right this minute, my suggestion would be to go to the 5 Love Languages website and take their quiz – it will help you clarify your love languages and you can encourage some of your key people to do the same to help you know how you can start working on your Spanish, or Mandarin, or Swahili as the case may be… I will put the link in the show notes and I would love to hear from you what you discover! I have long loved the 5 Love Languages book and conceptualization. I found it really impactful in my own marriage when I read the book many years ago and discovered that my primary love language ranks lowest for my husband and his primary love language ranks lowest for me…that might explain why we were always fighting for every bit of love we could try to muster out of one another! I have also found it to be a really meaningful tool as I work with couples and parents and other relationship challenges that my clients bring to session. Beyond clinical work, I also find it helpful as I navigate other relationships in my life – like running a group practice filled with diverse personalities, parenting my kiddos who are really different from one another in how they receive love, and caring for my friends and loved ones in ways that speak to them loud and clear that I see them and really care. But over the last year or two, I am finding myself having new conversations around love languages and it has been an absolute game changer in so many realms of my life and the lives of those I have spoken to around this. Here it is and this is my gift to you: your love language isn’t just something that needs to be filled by others, it is something that you can offer to yourself. …Ok, that may have felt a bit underwhelming…I know you’re probably thinking, “Classic Lindsay, she’s telling me about self-care again…” I mean…I am…kind of…but actually what I want us to talk about is so much more than that, and I hope you’ll stick with me. Love and feeling loved is so much more than being loved. Someone can love us, they can internally feel a deep sense of care and meaning and valuing toward us…but without action that reflects this internal state, without expression of that love, we have difficulty knowing it, holding on to it, feeling it, embodying it, and living out from it. I tried to track down who said it first and couldn’t figure it out, but whoever they were, they nailed it when they said that “love is a verb”. Loving well requires action, intention, communication. We want people we love to feel loved, and so we seek out opportunities and ways of demonstrating our love – whether it’s telling them we’re proud of them, or spending time doing a shared activity, or cuddling close, or fixing their car or bringing them flowers…these are effortful gestures to show love. They are ways we try to speak Spanish and show that we are effortfully trying to meet them in a way that allows them to feel seen, heard, known and valued. On the flip side, one of the other key pieces that author Gary Chapman talks about in his book, is that when you withdraw or weaponize someone’s love language against them, it is not only not loving, it is received as actively hurtful and degrading to the relationship. For example, my primary love language is words of affirmation, so I really value when my people tell me that I look nice or that they appreciate something I did or write a card to share that something mattered to them about me. I like other things, like if someone unloads the dishwasher, an act of service, or plans a movie date, quality time, but these don’t have the same degree of impactful meaning in making me feel really special and seen and cared about. Now because those things are second tier things that I value but don’t have the same degree of meaning, if someone fails to load the dishwasher, it’s maybe a bit annoying that I have to, but it doesn’t feel like it compromises my sense of being loved by them or mattering to them. Meanwhile, if someone in my life used critical, careless or hurtful words toward me, it doesn’t just sting, it feels eroding and can really jeopardize my feeling of safety in the relationship and make me spiral in myself. Our love language can be used both as a strengthening super power, and misused as kryptonite. Now, again, all of this is as it relates to interactions with others…but what about within ourselves? This is where it goes deeper than just “self-care” – what I am asking us to think about here is not only how we treat ourselves, but actually how we, at the very core of ourselves, seek to understand and build ourselves from a place of self-respect. I’ll give you an example and we can work from there. Again, my love language is words of affirmation – that can be used to strengthen me if used well, and if put into the wrong hands, it can become the kryptonite that erodes me. Now, that is true when placed into the hands of others as they interact with me…but it is also, and actually very much more so, true of me within me. Long before someone else in my life is likely to say, “Oh my god Lindsay, you are so stupid!” when I make a mistake, that loud thought has likely already echoed in my mind a million times. I am the first, the fastest and the loudest at using words to harm me. I am best at working against my own best interest. Here is where the rubber really hits the road. I remember a time when I caught myself thinking along these lines around a time when I had been doing a lot of work around love languages and I had this “aha” moment where I realized that I would never speak that way to anyone else in my life – especially someone who I knew to have words of affirmation as their primary love language – because I know the damage, relationally, that would do…and because I care about others, because I have respect and regard for them and my relationship with them, I wouldn’t want to risk that kind of harm so casually and haphazardly. …So why am I doing it to myself? Why am I worth anything less than the respect and regard I would show to literally anyone else on earth?? This is the gift friends. You are worth. You are worth the same respect and regard that you show to others everyday. And that needs to start from within you towards you. And understanding your love language and how you use that both for yourself and against yourself, and then mindfully using this information to engage with yourself from a place of respect and regard equivalent to what you would tend to show anyone else on the planet, gives you one of the greatest gifts. To feel loveable. To feel worth. To know and trust and embody your own worth in a more authentic way. And do you want to know what happens when we live from that place internally? We start to echo it out to everyone around us. I spend a lot of time catching moments when my inner critic shows up to make a speech to me from me. I hear that voice now and question how much room I choose to give it. I consider what I might want to put there instead. I wonder what I would say to someone else if they made this mistake or silly decision, and then I try to offer myself the same kind, sincere words. I have people I work with whose love languages are different than mine, but the process is similar. For many people whose love language is physical touch, there is a sense of comfort or care in closeness and physical sensation. They might tend to send negative messages to themselves by withholding access to touch from people in their life, like withdrawing from a hug; or they might actually use things like self-harm to be punitive toward their body’s desire for safety through sensation. Noticing these urges to use a love language against and then offering something more aligned to what you would want to offer someone you care about is the same fundamental course of action, it just looks a little different. It may mean asking for a hug and allowing yourself to allow it, or wrapping up in a warm weighted blanket for the sensation of warm and cuddled, or sipping a warm cup of tea for that sensation of nurturing and physical comfort. Yes, any of these actions might be considered “self-care” and that’s great, but they are actually deeper than that – they are aligning to your hearts deepest needs and cravings and being considerate of building up pieces of you mindfully and intentionally, the way you would with people you truly love and care about. Next episode we’re going to dig a little deeper into how we can build ourselves up and we’ll expand on examples of what this can look like for each of the 5 love languages. So if you are leaving this episode feeling like you are not totally sure of how you tangibly make this actionable in your own life with your love language, be sure to meet me back her next time. We’re also going to talk about how love languages can act as a clue around your primary needs in processing trauma and managing triggering…you won’t want to miss that. As we wrap up today, let me remind you that if you value this podcast and want to help us in our mission to support front line wellness, there are 4 ways you can do just that: 1. Rate and review Behind the Line on Apple Podcast, or wherever you are listening 2. Follow me on social media, @lindsayafaas, and engage with me and this amazing little community we are building there. Every time you like, comment and share our posts you help us spread like wildfire thanks to the magic of the algorithm. 3. Share this resource and our other resources with those you know. If you would like a poster or info cards about the podcast for your workplace, send me an email to [email protected] 4. Last but not least, consider joining Beating the Breaking Point, my resilience training program that seeks to fill the gaps in your training and support you in limiting the degree to which the job takes a toll. This program serves to sponsor all of the free supports and resources we make available, and is available for individuals to sign up for as well as workplace teams. Go to the show notes for a link to learn more. Know that we can be found online on our website, on most major podcast platforms as well as on youtube. We make all of our resources available to you because the work you do matters, but more than that, YOU matter and we want to make sure you have what you need to keep up the good work at work, as well as in your real life outside of work. So use it, and share it, and until next time, stay safe.