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The Angry Therapist Podcast

How Past Wounds Distort Your Definition of Love

The Angry Therapist Podcast

John Kim

Health & Fitness, Mental Health

4.61.1K Ratings

🗓️ 8 April 2026

⏱️ 27 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

How do childhood wounds, past relationships, and old emotional patterns shape your definition of love? In this episode, John Kim explores how relationship residue turns into distorted definitions of love. He breaks down how early experiences, family dynamics, unhealthy conflict, self-sacrifice, and internalized pain can create a damaging love blueprint that follows us into adulthood. John unpacks the unhealthy ways many people define love, including love as self-sacrifice, possession, completion, and dependency. He explains how these distorted beliefs can lead to codependency, control, unrealistic expectations, self-abandonment, and unhealthy relationship patterns. He also shares how heartbreak, expired relationships, and self-awareness can become a corrective love experience that helps you redefine love in a healthier way. Instead of losing yourself in romance, healthy love is built through interdependence, communication, compassion, conflict repair, individuality, and emotional growth. If you’ve ever struggled with attachment wounds, toxic relationship patterns, fear of abandonment, or confusion about what real love looks like, this episode will help you question the definitions you inherited and create a healthier, more grounded version of love. 🎙️ Host Links: 📘Pre order my new book, Love Hard On Purpose. Toss the blueprints. Build something honest. https://a.co/d/031PzkW4 📘 Read John’s book in progress Sh*t Your Therapist Would Never Tell You on John’s SubStack ⁠HERE⁠ If you’re ready for deeper work, the Secure Self course is available HERE Order John's new book, Break Up. On Purpose,⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ HERE⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Follow John on Instagram⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ HERE⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Find out more about John⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ HERE⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

What if my parents were wrong?

0:01.9

What if love I saw in the movies was never real to begin with?

0:05.6

What if my friends have been running the same program and calling it truth?

0:10.7

This is the fork in the road.

0:12.7

The moment the autopilot turns off because now for the first time you have a choice

0:16.9

to keep tracing someone else's map or start drawing your own.

0:29.6

My name is John Kim. You're listening to the Angry Therapist podcast on today's episode.

0:34.6

I'm going to give you a little clip, a cliff notes, if you will. I'm dating

0:40.3

myself of my new book called Love Hard on Purpose. Real quick, Love Hard was something that I was

0:47.9

writing about like 15 years ago, and it was just the idea that love isn't enough that you have to put effort into

0:58.5

loving and that you have to love hard like you run hard like you like it's hard to change

1:04.4

your body like what it takes to live on a higher frequency that love isn't necessarily easy. And then people started tattooing it.

1:13.8

I have a photo of someone tattooed it on her side. And then I started to stencil love heart all over

1:19.7

Los Angeles, like at two in the morning, just doing some street art. And it kind of felt like a movement.

1:25.8

But all of that energy 15 years later has manifested into a book

1:29.2

and it's not just the lessons I've learned from my own love experiences, but also from clients

1:35.6

and from just a collision of the various humans in my life, everything I learned about myself,

1:43.5

my patterns, you know, my shortcomings.

1:46.2

So it's kind of a, it's my anthology and also the final book of the on purpose trilogy.

1:52.5

So it's super important and meaningful to me.

1:55.5

Okay, this is called our definitions of love.

1:58.6

And by the way, I don't have a shirt on.

...

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