In this conversation on the Know Thyself podcast with André Duqum, Matthew explores why we so often mistake familiar patterns for healthy ones—and how our “normal” can quietly keep us stuck. From gravitating toward emotionally unavailable people to operating from scarcity and self-protection, he breaks down how our past shapes what we tolerate, even when it hurts.

This episode is a reminder that your past doesn’t get to dictate your future . . . and that real change begins when you stop staring at the wall you’ve mistaken for the world.

Matthew Hussey: 

It’s always good to just have in your mind the principle that we tend not to opt for things that make us happy. We opt for things that make us feel at home and comfortable and feel familiar, and the things that feel like home to us or familiar to us couldn’t be terrible. You know, depending on how we’ve grown up or what influences we’ve had, our normal can be really, really tough.

It could be something that it could be chronic anxiety. It can be chaos. It can be someone making us have to earn their love. It can be someone who’s inconsistent and, you know, goes cold for days on end and then gives us a little bit of affection and it feels amazing. And that can be what we’re used to.

And so when we say, why do I keep doing this? Why do I keep going for people that are bad for me. You’re not broken. You’re just doing what we all do, which is, you know, I list in a chapter called Never Satisfied. In the book, I list some of the reasons why we keep gravitating towards people who are bad for us.

One of them being a scarcity mindset, as you mentioned that when we think nothing else is coming along, we tend to settle for what’s right in front of us. When the second reason is, we choose bad people or people who treat us poorly because it’s what we know. And that’s not just like some self-confidence issue or self-worth issue.

It’s, you know, if I’m a dolphin in a tank, might grow up learning that to get a fish that has to do backflips or jump through a hoop, and then humans will feed it fish with that dolphin was released into the ocean tomorrow, and it started doing backflips or swimming up to boats for food that could be fatal.

We wouldn’t say that the dolphin had a self-worth problem. We would say, this dolphin is doing what it knows. Yeah. And it doesn’t differentiate between the ocean and the tank. It went when we were growing up in the tank in our own lives. The tank was the ocean. The tank was life, the tank was the world. So we go out into the world sort of looking for the experience we had in the tank, because it’s it’s what’s familiar to us.

Even if we see friends who are in healthier relationships, who are with people who don’t cheat or don’t treat them badly or make them feel safe, don’t belittle them or demean them or if we’ve never experienced that, then it’s not a reality for us. And we have that kind of myopia that it’s, ‘Yeah, I know that’s their life, but it’s not my life.’

It doesn’t feel real to us. What feels real to us is, is whatever we’ve come to believe is, you know, whatever life is to us, whatever is our experience, that’s what’s real to us. And we go looking unconsciously. We go looking for that experience out there in the world. We, you know, I, I write in the book about the, you know, the race car driver, Mario Andretti, and how he said his, you know, tip for race car driving was don’t look at the wall.

Because your car goes where your eyes go. And that always that’s not a throwaway thing to me. That what he said there. I really yeah, it’s kind of a mini obsession because I just, I think of so many places in my own life where the wall has been something I keep crashing into and, and how it takes it takes something very intentional to get to kind of orient our eyes away from the wall.

My whole life I had a hard time really trusting people, and I kind of grew up in an environment where, you know, there was a lot of a, you know, a sense of agenda and waiting for the other shoe to drop. And so for me, in my adult life, I found it hard to think that someone could be doing something just in a pure way, or that it could be reciprocal, or even just that people don’t, you know, it’s not people aren’t just going to take what they can get and they’re not going to just not everyone is a bad person or out to get you.

They’re just people like you. They have good days and bad days, and some days they’re more selfish and other days they’re more generous, and they tend to be more generous when they feel more safe and when they feel like they’re not being taken advantage of. And it’s hard to make someone else feel like they’re not being taken advantage of.

If you’re constantly in protection mode and you’re constantly kind of monitoring how much you give because you’re worried someone else is going to take advantage of you, you end up creating the wall. You literally end up creating scenarios where you either find people you can’t trust, or you turn, you know, by the way that you are in relationships, you create this very transactional relationship because you’re worried about getting hurt.

And so you, you know, you end up precipitating the very thing you’re most afraid of because that’s your wall. And I’ve become fascinated with how our past and our love life does not have to equal our future, no matter how long it’s been that way. But you but you have to find ways to start to create a different reality than the one that you’ve been experiencing for so long that your brain has started to think is just reality.

Because if you if you stare at the wall long enough, you won’t know it’s the wall anymore. You’ll just think it’s the world. And so what I help people to do is to start to use curiosity, which I think is really important. Gateway drug to new beliefs, to help people start to see that there may be other ways of being in the world that create new results than the ones they’ve gotten.

And when you get a new, even a slightly different result than the one you’ve gotten. So kind of a mind blowing thing because you realize this, you suddenly it’s like it becomes apparent to you that there’s a different way of being. And there are other realities outside of the one you’ve been living for so long. Then the world life becomes really expansive and you start to realize it. There’s so much more possibilities than the ones you’ve been telling yourself are available to you.

So beautiful. Thank you man. Thank you for sharing.

I love to abstract.

No, I think it it goes it hits it right on the head because it’s, you know, the, I guess the cliche of like looking at life through our color tinted lenses. Then our eyes adjust to just think, that’s the way that life is. And I love one of my favorite quotes from Wayne Dyer of when we change the way we look at things, the things we look at change.

Yes.

And it’s coming back again to that first principle of seeing how we look at things. And oftentimes we can’t always see the things that we’re perceiving about reality that become the default way. And the wall that we’re staring at, because it’s become so normalized for us, is just the ecosystem in which our consciousness is an inhabitant in. And, so I feel like relationships often do, because it’s like you feel good enough, happy enough to go into relationships that can give you the opportunity to reveal those blind spots. Because I feel like that is ultimately and I want to dive into how really relationships do become that mirror for us to see those spots where we’re not fully aware of because we do live in, this realm of duality where we relate to things. And that’s how we can see the reflection from other people. And romantic relationships got to be one of the probably the most trying, testing, potent reflections that could be.

Yeah. Which is kind of why it’s, at a certain point you have to be in the game because the idea of like, healing yourself and doing all of the work in isolation is like the one hand clapping, right? You know, it’s, certain point you’re going to have to meet the, the frontier between you and another person and all of the, the, you know, frictions that occur on that frontier.

The early in my relationship with my wife, when we were just dating, something happened that made me jealous. And it kind of came out of nowhere, like really snuck up on me. And I felt immediately unsafe. And not that I in the moment I would have framed it in terms of I feel unsafe. It made me mad.

But but really, beneath that I was unsafe and afraid and maybe felt slightly emasculated. But in that moment I kind of shut down and I became passive aggressive and probably a little controlling and just not a good version of me, not a version of me I would ever want to publicly. And it we probably argued for a couple of hours.

I mean, it wasn’t it was like just clashing for a while. And eventually I kind of shut down and just was like, went completely avoidant. And I think after a while, she kind of she came to me in a very compassionate way. I was like, look, I want to understand what this made you feel and or or it’s coming from because I hate the idea that I would never want to make you feel that and so on.

She also said, you can’t bring it to me in this way like so. She’s compassionate, but with the standard at the same time, which was important because it wasn’t okay the way that I handled it. I was very activated and eventually I shared with her what I had felt and why it made me feel that and maybe where it was coming from.

And I got a little vulnerable. And she was really loving and compassionate. And then I shut down again because I was like, I should never have said all of that. That was like, in my mind, I was like, that wasn’t sexy. I’ve now, like, gone from being this heroic, masculine in control person to, here’s all of my insecurity and here’s all the things I really feel.

And, and I shut down. I had like, a vulnerability hangover. And it’s so funny because I can think back to a time in my childhood when I was playing outside with my brothers and a couple of my friends, Alex, one of my best friends at the time, I was probably about 11 years old and we were all at our house and I can’t remember what happened, but something maybe my mom came out and yelled at me about something.

Something happened that embarrassed me and made me feel vulnerable. And I went up to my room in the middle of this beautiful sunny day. We were all playing outside. I went up to my room and I shut the door and I wouldn’t let anyone in. And every like my brother’s, my friend Alex, his brother, would all come up one by one and be like, come out like we, you know, we were having fun.

We’re going to do this and we’re going to go on the trampoline. Now we’re going to. And I was just like, no, like I’m, I’m fine. And then my mom came up Matt come on. Like come play. Like everyone’s having a good time. No. And I was just in my eye, you know, this was my way of reacting to me being hurt was to try to punish everybody else. God forbid I actually tell anyone I was hurt or embarrassed or ashamed and then I remember a couple of hours later, they came up and they went, we’re all going to go to Alex’s house now for the night. We’re going to like, carry on the sleepover. Alex’s, you know, come on, let’s go.

And I was like, no. One by one, everyone came up. No, my mom came up. Matt, please. Come on. They’re all going. Don’t do this. Like, everyone’s having a nice time. I had no enemies in the house. No one. Everyone loved me, but I shut everyone out. And I’ll never forget the next day when my brothers came home from that sleepover and they were like, oh, it was so great.

We watched movies. We did this. We ordered pizza we like. It was just this like, oh, I was so good. And it inside I felt sick. Because I missed out on something that I couldn’t get back. Like, I’ll never have been in that sleepover with my brothers and my friends and had that moment not because anyone was against me.

Everyone loved me, but because my inability to share what I was feeling or to just be vulnerable about the fact that something had affected me, made me punish everyone else. But really, I wasn’t punishing anyone. I was punishing myself. I deprived myself of that moment. And I look back on that moment with Audrey, and it’s that my wife, Audrey, when I pushed her away first, I wasn’t vulnerable because I did the same thing, right?

I shut myself in the room and told her to go away, and then when I finally did get vulnerable, I was like, what have I done? This is not I’m not lovable now. And so I shut down again and went, well, at least you’re not going to hurt me, because I’ll just now go quiet on you before you can tell me that I’m now not sexy.

And so I, I tried to shut her out again emotionally, and she said to me, I ended up confessing to her that I really felt like now that I’d said that she would look at me differently and she said, oh my God, that is so crazy. I think you’re amazing and I love getting to know you better. And the more I know you, the more I just feel like I know who you are and what I understand. You better have context for you. It doesn’t change the all the other stuff I know about you, all the amazing things that you are and it doesn’t change any of that. It just means I know more about you and I love getting to know more about you.

And it took me like, I don’t know if I really believed her in that moment, but over time, I started to realize she meant that. And that became this incredibly corrective healing experience for me because I actually realized, oh my God, this person really does. Not only do they accept me for all of me, but this idea I have in my head that if you know these things, you’ll change the way you see me and you’ll never see me as this other person again was completely false.

And that actually what made her love me more was seeing me as a whole person. But I that corrective experience helped heal me in that. I take some credit for it because I had to do what I hadn’t done before, which is to actually come forward with how I was feeling and how something had made me feel.

I give her an enormous amount of credit because the environment she helped create for me to do that made me brave. And then how she responded when I was brave made me even more brave, made me feel accepted. So that’s what I mean when I say that kind of one hand clapping thing, because that’s not something I could have achieved in a room on my own.

Yeah, in the same way as having it didn’t have to be with someone that I was romantically engaged with. It could have been with a friend, it could have been with a father figure. It could have been with someone else. But I needed some kind of corrective experience that helped me to question that belief that I wouldn’t be lovable if I started speaking about some of these things.

And André, it’s so funny. There’s something so meta about the fact that I’m even telling this story right now. Because honestly, if I’d have done this podcast five years ago, I wouldn’t have told this story I really wouldn’t like. I would have brought a more heroic version of myself to this conversation. But because of that, that healing, I now am much braver in the world because I have accepted myself differently.

I’ve made peace with parts of myself. I give myself a completely different level of compassion for where those things come from. Because by the way, if I was doing that at 11 years old, that was deep stuff. All right. That’s not new in my life. I’ve been doing it my whole life. If it was easy for me to change that, I would have changed it years ago.

How much of I cost myself in my life by being that way. I need to give myself compassion for wherever that comes from, because it certainly got wired up in a time when I wasn’t making conscious decisions about how I was getting wired up. So that’s how I think about these things. And I think when you’re able to give yourself that compassion, by the way, you’re able to give someone else a completely different level of compassion.

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