Episode 28: Your Card to Get Out of Jail Free
Do you ever feel stuck in a Monopoly-style jail, waiting for someone else to change so you can finally be happy? You’ve asked, you’ve pleaded—but they keep making the same choices, and you’re left rolling the dice, hoping for doubles. What if I told you there’s a way out that isn't a game of chance and doesn't require any luck? In this week’s episode, I’ll hand you the ultimate Get Out of Jail Free card so you can actually feel love no matter what anyone else does (or doesn’t do). Tune in and set yourself free.
If you want help getting out of "jail" as a mom, join me for this free webinar:
3 Hidden Reasons You're Fighting With Your Teenager (and how to stop!)
Register HereIf you've been enjoying this podcast, could you leave me a review?
Thanks so much!Connect with me on Instagram. Send me a DM or leave a comment to share your thoughts about this episode!
Full Transcript:
You're listening to the Think New Thoughts podcast with Emily Ricks, episode number 28. Your card to get out of jail free.
I'm Emily Ricks, and this is Think New Thoughts, a life coaching podcast to help you find more joy in your relationships. In each episode, I'll share a simple idea that will help you see things in a new way so you can love God, your neighbor, and yourself more deeply than you ever have before. If you're ready to literally change your mind, I think you'll like it here.
Have you ever played Monopoly? My sister and I used to play Monopoly, ridiculously long games for hours.
We were like elite level players, so using scissors and tape and the Xerox machine, we made our own $15 bills, $75 bills for when we landed on income tax, and even $1,000 bills. We were serious about Monopoly, and sometimes our games went on for days. Like in the real rules, you can only have one hotel on a property, but in our rules, you could do double or triple hotels.
Do you remember going to jail? If you roll doubles three times in a row or land on the space with the policeman in the blue hat blowing his whistle, then you have to go to jail. And you're there for three turns. If someone lands on your property while you're in jail, they don't have to pay you.
So you definitely didn't wanna be in jail when you have a triple hotel on boardwalk that would cost your sister $6,000 if she landed on it. You're in jail and can't get out for three turns unless you roll doubles on your turn, pay $50 to get out, or if you're lucky enough to have the little yellow community chest card that says get out of jail free. Then you can get out without paying, without rolling doubles, and without waiting three turns.
Oh, what a great game. Fun memories. So last week, we talked about manuals and how we create these invisible rule books that we want other people to follow so we can be happy.
We give other people our emotional remote control and tell them, don't press that button or you'll make me annoyed. Don't push this one or you'll make me sad. And don't you dare push that one or I'll get super mad.
And that whole arrangement is a setup for you to end up in a monopoly-like jail where the only way you can get out is if the other person does what you wrote in your manual for them to do. If they keep doing what you don't want them to do, you'll keep sitting in the jail where you feel frustrated and upset. You'll lose turns to do things you wanna do in your life while you're sitting there waiting for other people to change.
Here's what I want you to know. When other people do stuff you don't really want them to do, you don't have to stay stuck in a jail of frustration and anger and anxiety. There is a get-out-of-jail-free card.
It's called unconditional love. Unconditional love is how you set yourself free from the jail you end up in when you pound your fist on the manuals you've written for how other people need to behave, insisting that they change to make you happy. Let me tell you what I mean.
So first, let's define love. What is it exactly? And is it a circumstance, a thought, a feeling, an action, or a result? Quick review of the self-coaching model I love and use as a coach, CTFAR. Circumstances happen.
We think thoughts about them, which are optional, and our thoughts create our feelings, which are chemical vibrations in our bodies. And then from those feelings, we do stuff or don't do stuff on the action line of the model. And what we think and feel and do ultimately produces a result for us in our lives.
So where does love go in the model? Sometimes we think of love as an action, as in love is patient, love is kind. Those are things that we do or how we show up in a loving way. I recommend you don't think of love as an action, and I'll tell you why in a minute.
If we were to ask Elvis Presley or countless other songwriters, they would say that love is a circumstance. I can't help falling in love with you, right? According to pop culture, love is something that just happens to you or doesn't happen to you and really isn't in your control. I recommend that you don't think of love as a circumstance.
Another place we could put love in a CTFAR model is on the result line. Because when we really dig in and sacrifice and serve other people, the result is that we grow to love them more. And that's true.
But for today, when we're talking about love and specifically unconditional love, we're gonna put love on a feeling line. Love is a feeling. It's created by our thoughts.
And it's one of the greatest emotions we could possibly feel. Love feels amazing, right? Don't we all wanna feel it? And yet often we choose not to feel love. One of the most common reasons we choose not to feel love is when someone else does something we don't want them to do.
And then we turn love into a type of contract that has terms and conditions. If you say nice things and agree with me and live according to my values, then I will feel love for you. If you are unkind, if you don't do what I wrote on page 75 of my manual that I have for you, if you disagree with me, then I won't feel love for you.
With kids, it sounds like if you obey me, I will feel love for you. If you get good grades, if you go to church, if you tell me the truth, if you follow the rules, then I will feel love for you. If you don't, then I'll feel something other than love, like worry or fear or anger or resentment.
And this seems logical enough. And so many people set up their relationships like this, but it's actually a terrible thing to do to yourself. Choosing unconditional love is the other option.
But let's talk about conditional love first. Conditional love is earned by doing stuff or not doing stuff. And it's lost by doing or not doing stuff, right? If you do this and this and this, I love you.
If you don't do this and this, I don't love you. If you believe in conditional love, then the lens that you're looking through is that people can deserve it. They don't deserve my love or they do deserve my love.
And people can disqualify from deserving my love if they've once had it. Conditional love is limited in supply and it has to be measured. It's like there's only so much of it and I don't wanna run out and I don't wanna overuse it because it's this limited resource.
So I like to think of conditional love like water coming out of a faucet. And so you turn it on sometimes. Okay, I'm gonna choose to love this person, but then you also turn it off sometimes.
No, I'm not gonna love that. And with the faucet, we've got a rash in the water. There's only so much of it.
We might run out if we're not careful or if we turn it on and just leave it on, then there's gonna be a flood and it's gonna be dangerous somehow. And that's how conditional love feels. So many people live like this.
Conditional love is the remote control that I was talking about last week where you basically hand over your emotions to someone else and say, hey, if you push this button, I'll turn the faucet on and feel love. But if you push this button, then I'm gonna turn the faucet off and feel anger and hatred and disgust and frustration. So that's an option.
That's what conditional love feels like. And for a lot of people, they turn the faucet off because they don't wanna give someone else water. You don't deserve my love because you are doing terrible things.
I don't want you to benefit from my love because you hurt me in some way. So I'm gonna withhold it from you. And this can feel really true.
It makes sense why people do it. But hear me out. Choosing to put conditions on when you will feel love and not feel love for another person based on the choices they choose to make or not make is landing on the go to jail space in Monopoly.
It traps you. You can only feel love if they do what you want them to do. And I guarantee you that will only happen some of the time, if at all, depending on the person.
So in the end, if you put conditions on your love, you're punishing yourself for what someone else chooses to do. You think you're withholding love from them, but actually you're withholding love from you. You're the one who doesn't get to feel love when you have all these conditions on it, when you stand by the faucet and turn it off based on whether people follow your manuals or not.
If you think of love as a feeling, you can see that it's not a limited resource. It's not possible to feel too much love. There's not like a reservoir of the emotion of love, and if you feel it too much or too often, you're gonna run out.
It's unlimited. And if you think of love as a feeling, you can see that while you can act in a loving way towards someone else, you can serve them, you can do nice things for them, but you can't actually give another person the feeling of love, right? Have you ever said kind words or given a gift or spent time with someone when you were feeling loving toward them and they were ungrateful and unappreciative and they didn't feel love at all? That's because when you feel love, it doesn't jump out of your body and into someone else's body. That's not how feelings work.
Our own thoughts create our own feelings. Someone else's anger doesn't jump out of their body and into your body. Your thoughts create what you feel.
So when you stand by the faucet and put terms and conditions on when you're willing to feel love and not feel love for someone else, you're actually punishing yourself. You're withholding love from yourself. You're depriving yourself of the opportunity to feel love, which is the most amazing feeling in the world.
So why would anyone choose to do that? Usually we do it to protect ourselves, but the idea that feeling too much love is dangerous is actually an illusion. Instead of all this, you can choose to believe in unconditional love. Unconditional love can't be earned.
Also, it can't be lost. It's a given no matter what. It's not possible to deserve or not deserve.
And there's no conditions about who can have it and who can't and when. It flows abundantly and it never runs out. Unconditional love is the opposite of having a manual for how somebody else has to be to make you happy.
It's also the opposite of handing your emotional remote control over to someone else, right? Unconditional love is like taking the battery out of the remote and handing it to someone else and saying, okay, no matter what button you push on this whole thing, I'm just gonna feel love for you. Push any button you want. It's not gonna control my feelings.
I hold the remote to those. In the coaching world, we like to say, I love you and there's nothing you can do about it. That's what unconditional love is.
You can't make me stop loving you. I'm gonna feel love no matter what you do. So with conditional love, we believe that the feeling of love is scarce.
We have to be careful with it. We've gotta ration it and we need to protect ourselves because too much would be dangerous. We can turn the faucet on a little, but not too much.
Unconditional love is like a waterfall. Have you ever hiked through a waterfall and been amazed at how the water just keeps flowing and flowing? How does it never run out or stop? I don't know. There are certain hikes I've been on and 10 years later, 20 years later, that waterfall is still flowing and flowing.
So do you wanna think of love as a faucet or as a waterfall? Do you wanna believe that love is conditional and that you have to earn it and that God turns off his faucet of love for you when you make bad choices and that you need to turn off your faucet of love when other people make bad choices? You're free to believe in conditional love if you want to. Or you can choose to believe in unconditional love, that God loves you no matter what and that his love flows endlessly toward you like a waterfall and there's nothing you can do to get him not to love you. If you believe this, then you can offer that same kind of love to anyone in your life anytime you want to, no matter what they do.
Instead of setting conditions on your love based on whether people live by the manual you wrote for them, you can choose unconditional love. You can say, hey, you have agency to make whatever choices you want to. Whatever you say, whatever you do, I'm gonna choose to feel love.
You can't put me in jail because my love isn't conditional on anything you do or say. I choose to feel it no matter what. And this is pretty radical.
It might sound completely crazy to you, but it's the greatest gift you can give yourself to choose to love other people without conditions because love feels amazing. Why wouldn't you choose to feel it as often as possible? Here's what happens for a lot of people, though, when they learn this. They're like, uh, hang on.
Unconditional love sounds like jail because I don't want to have to love people if they do terrible things. You're saying I should stay in a relationship that's abusive? You're saying I should just let my teenager walk all over me and never set any limits? You're saying I should just love everyone and never confront someone who's doing things that I don't agree with? No, that's not what I'm saying at all. And this is why it's so helpful to think of love as a feeling.
What I teach, what I learn at the Life Coach School is that you can feel love anytime you want to about any situation. Then, from that place of feeling love, you can then decide what actions you want to take or not take. Because love can look a million different ways on the action line.
You can feel love for someone and still say no to certain things. You can feel love for someone and choose to have a conversation about something that needs to be addressed. You can feel love for someone and limit the time or energy or money you choose to give them.
So you can have a feeling of love for every single person in your life anytime you want to. And that feeling will never run out. Money in your bank account can run out.
Time in your schedule can run out. Energy that you have can run out. So on the action line, you'll want to set some terms and conditions.
You'll want to turn the faucet on and off on your actions so you can protect your resources. But what I'm saying is don't set conditions on your feeling line. Don't turn love on and off.
Let it flow unconditionally like a waterfall. So you just landed on community chess and I'm handing you a get out of jail free card. If other people aren't doing the things you want them to do, play this card.
Choose to love them without any conditions no matter what they say or do. Don't hold your breath and wait for them to change. Don't try to manipulate or control them so you can get out of jail.
Choose love. Then from that place, you can set terms and conditions on your action line to take care of your needs and live the life you want to live. That's called setting boundaries.
It's completely different than telling other people what they have to do to make you happy. It is totally not the same thing as telling someone not to push buttons on your emotional remote control. To set and uphold joyful boundaries, you do that from a feeling of love, not from hatred or annoyance or frustration or anger.
I really do believe that practicing unconditional love is the get out of jail free card for any frustration you have with another person. Try it out and see if you agree. Thanks for joining me today.
I'll talk to you next week. At the end of this month, I'm teaching a free class called the three hidden reasons you're fighting with your teenager and how to stop. You'll get a deeper understanding of what's actually going on between you and your teen when you're arguing so you can start addressing the real issues.
You'll walk away from this webinar with three tools to help you drastically reduce the contention in your home and increase the hope and excitement you feel about your parenting. Register for this free class at emilyrickscoaching.com/webinar or use the link in the show notes of this episode. If you're not a mom of teenagers, consider sharing the link with someone you know who is.