For The Love With Jen Hatmaker Podcast

Some of us will sit in years of low grade misery rather than have one uncomfortable conversation. Jen will be first to raise her hand. She has put off a confrontation so long that the frustration outlasted the thing she was frustrated about. Saying the quiet thing out loud is not only about the truths we tell ourselves. Sometimes it is the sentence we owe another person, the one we have been rehearsing in the shower for eight months and still have not said.
Dr. Rick Hanson is a psychologist, senior fellow at UC Berkeley’s Greater Good Science Center, and New York Times bestselling author of Making Great Relationships. He reframes the whole problem in a way that took the air out of Jen’s dread: confrontation is not a personality trait you either have or you do not. It is a skill, which means it can be learned and practiced.
In this episode, Jen and Rick explore:
Why relationships are built out of small back and forth interactions
The difference between what comes at you and what you send back, and where your real power lives
Rick’s five part checklist for wise speech, plus the optional sixth
What to do when a conversation goes sideways, and how to know your own lines
The permission to resize a relationship instead of ending it
If you have been carrying something for months waiting for the right moment, consider this a nudge and a toolkit.
Thought-provoking Quotes:
“Relationships are made from interactions. The gradual weight of interactions, for better or worse, over time shapes the relationship.” (Dr. Rick Hanson)
“What comes over the net is out of our control in the moment. But what we do at that point, how we respond, what we choose, that is under our control.” (Dr. Rick Hanson)
“Most arguments are about the past. They will never see it your way. The best you can get them to do is agree to something different from now on.” (Dr. Rick Hanson)
“I never get free until I identify whatever I was responsible for, which sometimes is zero.” (Dr. Rick Hanson)
“I will walk around with a conflict in my brain and heart and bury it until it comes out sideways. Because it does. It will find a way out.” (Jen Hatmaker)
Resources Mentioned in This Episode:
Making Great Relationships by Dr. Rick Hanson
Mother Nurture by Dr. Rick Hanson
Nonviolent Communication by Marshall B. Rosenberg
Being Well Podcast with Dr. Rick Hanson and Forrest Hanson
Global Compassion Coalition - https://globalcompassioncoalition.org/
Greater Good Science Center - https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/
Guest’s Links:
Website - https://rickhanson.com/
Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/rickhansonphd
Podcast - https://rickhanson.com/being-well-podcast/
Connect with Jen!
Jen’s Website - https://jenhatmaker.com/
Jen’s Instagram - https://instagram.com/jenhatmaker
Jen’s Twitte ...

Description:
Nine years is a long time between visits. When Amena Brown was last on the show in 2017, she was a spoken word poet booked solid inside white evangelicalism, doing one poem at a time between worship songs and quietly wondering how much longer she could keep walking back in. She came back to tell Jen what happened next.
This conversation traces the whole arc: the green rooms where she was told her grief was divisive, the healing circle where a Black woman looked her dead in the face and said you have to get out, the three months of panic attacks that followed, and the call from Tracee Ellis Ross that showed her a bigger world was possible. It is a story about leaving before you have a new boat built.
Then there is the book. Never Tell a Black Girl How to Black Girl started as a poetry collection and became something wilder, funnier, and more free. Amena talks about Black Girl as a verb, the essay she cried writing, her list of qualifying reasons for a Black Woman Day Off, and why the audiobook has a live Black girl audience hollering back. Bring your cheekbones. They are going to be sore.
Thought-provoking Quotes:
You can't keep re-entering that space. Every time you re-enter, it re-traumatizes you. (Amena Brown, quoting the leader of a Black women's healing circle)
Whatever a Black girl does is Black girling. If I'm a Black girl who likes to fry chicken, then that's Black girling. If I'm a Black girl who likes to play the cello, that is Black girling. (Amena Brown)
Save nothing for the swim home. (Jen Hatmaker, quoting literary agent Margaret Riley King)
I love about Cardi B that she gives me permission to be mad as hell. (Amena Brown)
Joy is a part of how we survive, it's a part of how we resist. (Amena Brown)
Resources Mentioned in This Episode:
Never Tell a Black Girl How to Black Girl by Amena Brown (Tiny Reparations Books)
How to Fix a Broken Record by Amena Brown
Awake by Jen Hatmaker
Bookshop.org, plus your local indie and Black-owned bookstores and your library
The Together Live tour with Glennon Doyle and Abby Wambach
PATTERN Beauty and Tracee Ellis Ross
Lemonade by Beyonce
New Blue Sun by Andre 3000
Austin Channing Brown, Jeff Chu, and Sarah Bessey
Guest's Links:
Website - https://www.amenabrown.com/
Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/amenabee/
Podcast - https://www.amenabrown.com/her-with-amena-brown
Connect with Jen!
Jen's Website - https://jenhatmaker.com/
Jen's Instagram - https://instagram.com/jenhatmaker
Jen's Twitter - https://twitter.com/jenHatmaker/
Jen's Facebook - https://facebook.com/jenhatmaker
Jen's YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/user/JenHatmaker
The For the Love Podcast is presented by Audacy.

Description:
In this Book Club edition of For the Love, Jen sits down with novelist Annie Hartnett to talk about The Road to Tender Hearts — a book Jen calls heart-wrenching, heartwarming, weird, hilarious, and deeply satisfying all at once.
They open with a very funny catch-up from Me Camp, the solo month Jen takes every July. This year she’s in a tiny lake town in Canada, cooking, meeting neighbors, reading on the deck at sunset — and buying blueberries for scones instead of checking her calendar.
From there, Annie traces her path from high-school art major to novelist, and the two teachers whose offhand comments redirected both of their lives. She unpacks the real backstory behind the novel: a Providence rental house that delivered basement floods, gas leaks, black mold, vicious rats, a falling tree, and a neighborhood tragedy — all in 2020 — and the anxiety that followed her to a new town anyway. Her answer was to write down every bad thing she feared could happen to her family, then make it as funny as she possibly could.
Jen and Annie also get into:
PJ Halliday, built from Annie’s dad and grandfather — lottery dreams, storytelling, lollipop trees and all
Pancakes the death-predicting cat, inspired by Oscar, a real Rhode Island nursing-home cat
Why Ivy and Fred keep loving PJ, and what that tells us about him
How a talking cat in chapter one bought Annie the freedom to go very dark
Writing grief, addiction, and fear without losing the comedy
The “year of floundering” that starts every new book
Why readers mourn whichever character they want, no matter what the author intended
Jen closes by asking what Annie’s reading, and Annie makes a hard case for Lost Lambs by Madeline Cash.
Thought-provoking Quotes:
“Life is suffering and joy.” — Pancakes, The Road to Tender Hearts
“I realized in that class that I could be exactly who I am. I could be weird and I could be really accepted.” — Annie
“Your words are not wasted. The stuff that you say into our little ears when we are formative and searching can absolutely set me on a path.” — Jen
“She took my face in her hands and said, Jennifer, you have a gift for words and you should use it.” — Jen
“I will put every bad thing that I think could happen to my family in a book, but I will make it as funny as possible.” — Annie
“That’s how I feel like that’s the only way you get through bad things — to talk about them. But also to make them funny.” — Annie
“I love people despite their flaws, sometimes because of their flaws.” — Annie
“He has to be loved before he can really… he wants to be in the family.” — Annie, on PJ
“The year of floundering, when you spend a year just flopping around like a fish out of water.” — Annie
Resources Mentioned in This Episode:
The Road to Tender Hearts by Annie Hartnett
Unlikely Animals and Rabbit Cake by Annie Hartnett
Lost Lambs by Madeline Cash
Guest’s Links:
Website - https://www.anniehartnett.com/
Instagram - https://instagram.com/annie_hartnett
Newsletter - https://www.anniehartnett.com/newletter
Connect with Jen!
...

Description:
Jen is coming to you from the last two days of Me Camp in Canada, eyeballs on the lake, four weeks into having the volume turned down on every channel. And when the static quiets, the truer things rise up. In this me-to-you episode, Jen kicks off August's theme of honesty with the idea at the spine of the whole month: there is the thing we say, and then there is a truer sentence sitting an inch underneath it. And usually one inch under that.
Jen shares what her own silence cost in the last years of her marriage, names the difference between truth-telling and truth-throwing, and offers the gentlest possible place to begin: one true sentence, one page, just between you and you.
Thought-provoking Quotes:
“Staying quiet only masquerades as keeping the peace. We are genuinely just deferring the bill.”
“It doesn't disappear just because we're not willing to look it in the eye. It just goes underground, but it charges interest.”
“So here I am thinking I'm protecting this marriage, protecting the kids — and I was actually helping to sink the ship.”
“My body was absolutely telling the truth. Maybe my mouth wasn't, but my body was.”
“There is a difference between truth telling and truth throwing.”
“Honest is not the same thing as "unfiltered." Honest and kind are not opposites.”
“You are not too much, and your real self is not an inconvenience.”
Resources Mentioned in This Episode:
The AWAKE Collective, the monthly live gathering where this conversation started, included with a paid subscription to Jen’s Substack: jenhatmaker.substack.com
Letters from the Middle, Jen’s Substack, where the honesty conversation continues all month: jenhatmaker.substack.com
Tell us your story — head to jenhatmaker.com/podcast, look for the Send Voicemail button, and tell Jen the quiet thing you finally said out loud (or the one you’re working up to).
Connect with Jen!
Jen’s Website - https://jenhatmaker.com/
Jen’s Substack - https://jenhatmaker.substack.com/
Jen’s Instagram - https://instagram.com/jenhatmaker
Jen’s Twitter - https://twitter.com/jenHatmaker/
Jen’s Facebook - https://facebook.com/jenhatmaker
Jen’s YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/user/JenHatmaker
The For the Love Podcast is presented by Audacy.

Description:
Some yeses cost us something. Some of them save us.
Jen sits down with her partner, actor, author, and speaker Tyler Merritt, hours after his chemotherapy infusion. Tyler is midway through treatment for colorectal cancer, his second diagnosis in six years, and the two get honest about making thoughtful decisions when your body is calling every shot.
They talk about the yes Tyler gave in the middle of radiation: booking a brand-new theater tour that opens seventeen days after his last chemo, a yes he says he "arguably shouldn't have" given, made so he'd have something beautiful to walk toward. Jen turns the lens on her own year and the yes she almost took back: getting on the plane to Me Camp after a hysterectomy, a brutal spring, and a boyfriend in chemo two thousand miles away.
Tyler also flips the mic and asks Jen whether she regrets writing AWAKE. Her answer is about closure, discretion, and the two longest weeks of her life waiting to hear what her daughter thought of the book.
Plus: how to tell your intuition from everybody else's fear, Jen's top three Me Camp TV experiences, one Enneagram argument, and the one yes Tyler is still too scared to say out loud.
Thought-provoking Quotes:
"There is something absolutely sacred in choosing your body in a time period where it may not be convenient." — Tyler
"Rest is the thing that I choose. Rest is my sacred yes." — Tyler
"It's not a yes that feels obligated. It's not coerced. It isn't even careless. It's thoughtful. It is baked in with wisdom." — Jen
"In the midst of the fire, I made the decision to do something that would be difficult if I was just healthy." — Tyler
"When someone else puts their caution on your yes, that can be a real governor on forward progress." — Jen
"The sacred yes I'm afraid to say out loud is that I'm going to be okay." — Tyler
Resources Mentioned in This Episode:
AWAKE by Jen Hatmaker
I Take My Coffee Black by Tyler Merritt
Tyler's new theater tour, opening August 28
Me Camp, the Enneagram, and Jeremy Pope
John Candy: I Like Me, Widows Bay, The Bear, The Five-Star Weekend
Guest's Links:
Website - thetylermerrittproject.com
Instagram - @thetylermerrittproject
Twitter - @TTMProject
Facebook - The Tyler Merritt Project
Youtube - The Tyler Merritt Project
Connect with Jen! Jen's Website - https://jenhatmaker.com/
Jen's Instagram - https://instagram.com/jenhatmaker Jen's Twitter -

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