Creating Meaningful Relationships: Gavin Frye’s Guide to Intimacy

If you're feeling the frustration of pouring your heart and soul into communication with your partner, but still not feeling heard or understood, then you are not alone! Get to know Gavin Frye, an experienced spiritual therapist and leadership mentor who has dedicated 40 years to helping people find their true selves and build authentic connections. Show Notes | Transcript The key is to be able to use conflicts and difficulties to strengthen the relationship and become more intimate. - Gavin Frye Meet Gavin Frye, a licensed spiritual therapist and leadership mentor with 40 years of experience in helping individuals and couples navigate the complexities of life and relationships. In his new book, "The Real You: Leading Your Life from Your Authentic Self," he shares his wisdom on cultivating a deep understanding of oneself and nurturing meaningful relationships. Listen to Gavin's conversation with Gloria Grace Rand as they discuss the importance of courageous conversations in building intimacy and openness, and learn more about Gavin's personal journey that led him to his calling in spiritual therapy. In this episode, you will be able to: Embrace your true self by exploring the interconnectedness of your inner world and the universal journey Overcome life's challenges and obstacles with proven approaches Develop meaningful and successful relationships through understanding their purpose and triggers Build emotional intimacy and openness with others by engaging in brave and honest conversations Set out on a remarkable journey combining truthfulness, self-discovery, and devotion to aiding others Related Live. Love. Engage. episodes you may enjoy: The Five Elements of Relationships with Dr. Vicki Matthews In this episode, Dr. Matthews explains how to apply the 5 elements of Chinese medicine to relationships. Thriving in the Storms of Life with Rod Knoerr Certified Leadership Coach Rod Knoerr joins us on this episode to share his life and his journey of thriving in the storms of life. Resources: Connect with Gavin here Purchase Gavin Frye's book, The Real You: Leading Your Life from Your Authentic Self here Join the Soulful Women's Network here Send me a message here ☕ Support the podcast here ❤ Love this episode? Leave us a review and rating here Connect with Gloria: LinkedIn | Instagram | Facebook | YouTube | Twitter TRANSCRIPT Gloria Grace Rand Namaste. I am so glad to be with you again for another episode of Live Love Engage. And I really want to welcome all of you here, those of you who are listening on your favorite podcast platform and those of you watching on YouTube. I am looking forward to our conversation today with Gavin Frye, who has 40 years of experience as a licensed spiritual therapist and leadership mentor to entrepreneurs. And he also has a new book called The Real You - Leading your life from your authentic self. And this book is a comprehensive work that illuminates and makes accessible the universal path of the authentic self. And I know we were going to talk about something, but I think I'm definitely going to want to actually ask you a little bit about that, especially the universal path of that. That's raising my curiosity. So, first off, I want to officially welcome you, Gavin, to live, love, engage. Gavin Frye Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here with you, Gloria. Gloria Grace Rand Thank you. And I, well, not always, but I would say 90% to 95% of the time, I love to start off these interviews with asking our guests a little bit about their journey. And so you've been doing this type of work for quite a while, and I was curious about what prompted you to get down this path of being a spiritual therapist and leadership mentor. Gavin Frye Well, it's quite a story. All of us have our own challenges and things that we have to reckon with in life, and mine has been a ride. So my career got catapulted into this profession of psychology when I was in my teens because I grew up with a sister who was a heroin addict for 17 years. And then my brother took it even further. He was five years older than me, and he became, he took on the law and he started doing burglary and then kidnapping, and then he became a white supremacist gang leader, and he killed a lot of black people. Gloria Grace Rand Oh, my goodness. Wow. Gavin Frye I'm riding the horses behind them. And it's just decimating to my family, my mom and dad, and to me. I mean, I just held on, honestly, Gloria, for dear life for six or seven years. But it catapulted me towards psychology because I needed to actually find a place where I could come into healing and I could come into understanding. And then after psychology, then the whole arena of spirituality and its central importance in human evolution and my healing showed up. So by the time I was 25, I started having very deep… I started to let go of the trauma that I'd carried and learned how to do that. And I also started to open up to my spirit inside and the way spiritual energy moved through me with compassion and love and wisdom. So that's why, even though what, I'm 67, I just turned 67. It's been 40 years, but by my mid twenties, I had found my love, my passion, which was to really work with people. I was drawn towards intimacy and how can relationships flourish. I was stunned by the divorce rate, and I just watched my own parents, and I watched people have challenges. And said why is a committed relationship so darn painful and difficult and often breaks? And I started to discover a lot of keys about that, which we can talk about today. Gloria Grace Rand Yeah, absolutely. Well, first off, well, happy birthday, number one, but also sorry to hear about the challenges with siblings. Are you the baby in the family, then? Gavin Frye I'm the baby in the family, and I had to do all kinds of things in response to all of that. Of course, I wanted to be the good kid, and I didn't want to cause my parents anymore. All the fallout in the wake of that was part of my reckoning. Gloria Grace Rand Yeah, I resonate with that because that's pretty much my story as well. Not exactly the same type of things, but yeah, I have older brother and older sister, and they both were having a lot of trouble with mom in particular, and so I avoided that. Now, did your siblings, did your sister recover? If it's okay for me to ask. Gavin Frye No, you can ask me anything. My sister actually came out. She came through it, which is not easy because she was a long term and an early addict, but she used Narcotics Anonymous, and then she turned towards Christianity. So she's in a church in Oregon and doing well. Now my brother, interestingly enough, after 15 years and being locked in solitary confinement, he was talking to a prison ministry volunteer, and he had a full blown religious conversion to Christ. Gloria Grace Rand Oh, wow. Gavin Frye That was real. I mean, he was as if all that other stuff, all those layers just dropped away. He became a model inmate. They let him out of prison. And then he went to work in this church, same church as my sister in Oregon. And he worked with the youth. And you can imagine he still had all his tattoos. He spoke. He was a powerful influence on their lives. Gloria Grace Rand Yeah, I can imagine. Gavin Frye He married. He was going to have kids. He was taking a nursing program, but he died suddenly in an automobile accident when he was, like, 40. But the arc of his life was quite dramatic. But he did find the promised land. Gloria Grace Rand Well, that's good. I'm glad to hear that. I may want to talk with you more about this afterwards. Definitely some parallels in our lives here, but that's for another day. So I want to get back to I want to talk first a little bit about the book, and then we can talk a little bit more about maybe the intimate relationships, because I mentioned when I was introducing you that I was curious about how you refer to it as the universal path of the authentic self. So what do you mean by that? And maybe even why did you wind up writing the book as well? Gavin Frye Yeah, I hear you. Well, what I mean by universal is that within each of us as humans, in my experience, underneath it all, our deepest nature is what I'm talking about is the terrain of the authentic self. And I could call it soul, I could call it divine. Lincoln called it the better angels of our nature. But that’s like, aside from whatever language, there's love, there there's wisdom, there's compassion. So the universal path is really akin to Joseph Campbell's the Hero's Journey. Gloria Grace Rand Okay. Gavin Frye What's amazing is, when we're born, if you see a six-month-old child, they are totally authentic. They can't not be authentic. So that's the first stage. It's like this immersion. But most of us encounter difficulties in trauma, and then we adapt, and we often adapt things that are to survive and protect ourselves. I call that the false self or the adapted self. And then we mistake that for who we are, and we lose touch with that deeper connection. So that's the second stage. The third stage is when you touch back into who you are, and you go, oh, my God, like I did at 25. Gloria Grace Rand Right. Gavin Frye And the rest of my life has been about getting more anchored there. The desire often is to serve from there, give to others. And so that's what's fueled my growth and my work. But I'm always stunned by… I'll have a client come in, and he says, I just want to tell you I've never had a spiritual experience. And I say, really? So I said, well, tell me about some of the richer experiences you've had. So they'll say, well, okay, well, I was in nature once, and there was this time where just I came out of the forest and something happened, and this energy descended on me, and it was like I was bigger than my body. And I said,...