Loving Relationships with Lori Carpenos

Author, therapist and coach Lori Carpenos has seen that what affects our relationships the most is our state of mind. When the couples she works with see that ‘working on’ their relationship is not the answer to a loving relationship, that’s when everything changes.

Lori Carpenos opened a private individual, couples and family counseling practice, in 1994, to pass along something she had stumbled upon in 1985, when she was privileged to meet the late Sydney Banks. As a result, her life changed in ways she could never have imagined at that time.

She maintains a private practice in West Hartford, CT as a therapist, life coach, business consultant, facilitator, and writer.

You can find Lori Carpenos at 3PrinciplesTherapy.com.

You can listen above, on your favorite podcast app, or watch on YouTube. Notes, links, resources and a full transcript are below.

Show Notes

• Starting out as an art teacher
• Resonating with Sydney Banks’ exploration of innate mental health
• On recognizing that ‘working’ on a relationship only makes things harder
• How we all fall back into love when our minds are quiet
• Getting on the wrong bus with our thinking but knowing we can choose a different ride
• How we all always have all the love we need within us
• How arguments originate from our state of mind
• On being single and our relationship to thought about that
• How we are all in relationship with our thinking

Transcript of Interview with Lori Carpenos

Alexandra: Lori Carpenos, welcome to Unbroken.

Lori: Oh, thank you, Alexandra. It’s nice to be with you.

Alexandra: It’s great to have you here. I’m so happy to meet you.

Tell us a bit about your background and how you came to find the Three Principles.

Lori: Well, they actually found me. It was quite by happenstance. I’d never heard of Sydney Banks, never heard of the three principles. I was an art teacher in Massachusetts, and I got a master’s in expressive arts therapy. I had this idea I wanted to do art therapy. And the place for that was California.

So I was 25 years old, and I decided to quit my tenured art teacher job. Much to the dismay of my parents. They tried to stop me. But I felt called in retrospect, when I realized it was not to be an art therapist, because I’m driving across the country. Because California was known as the land of New Thought and new things. And art therapy was supposedly really big.

I get halfway across. And I’m listening to a program, NPR, where they’re talking about a bill that had just passed in California, eliminating art, music, all the extra curricular activities in hospitals, schools, and I couldn’t believe it. It was like I was hearing something that was not true. And I’m thinking well, I’m halfway there. I already quit my job. I don’t have a job back on the east coast. So what do I do?

I decided to keep going. I didn’t have a job. I knew one person in Northern California where I was headed to. No job, a cocktail waitress with my master’s degree my pocket. And one thing led to another. Well it’s a long story not to get into. But the crux of the matter was, I got into a relationship with a boyfriend, who had gotten the degree from California trans personal psychology, and he was heading to Florida, to the Advanced Human Studies Institute, which you probably heard was the first training place in, in, in the world, actually, at that time. So I thought, well I’ll go with him, of course, I’ll go with him, I’ll be closer to my family, then.

I went out to California and this is now three years later. I did get a few part time jobs as an art therapist in the VA hospital, and also in Children’s Hospital at Stanford University. And both of those were really interesting situations. So I landed at the Advanced Human Studies Institute, and I’m going to a talk by this unknown person to me, Sydney Banks, and it was like somebody turned a light on in my head, is the only way I could explain it.

I suddenly realize that the trajectory of my life is not completely up to me. That there’s some flow that is beyond me. And what I realized later, is how else to describe something like that, but I was drawn, I was driven to drive all that distance, by myself alone in my car with whatever belongings I had at the time. I realized later that it was really was a calling to be part of this understanding the which now we know is the whole paradigm shift in psychology.

Alexandra: And what happened next? Where did where did this road take you?

Lori: At the Advanced Human Studies Institute, and I wasn’t a student, but my boyfriend was a student for a year, and I saw that he was calmer, more settled down. And so I decided to take the year training. And that’s where I met so many people from that are familiar to you and some of the listeners.

I learned from them as much as I did from Syd Banks because they would have insights. And I would realize, yeah, I see that true. When you hear truth, everybody knows that. It resonates, it makes perfect sense. You can’t debate it.

Alexandra: I’m just curious, was he there all the time, or was he coming and going?

Lori: He would come and go, yeah, he would come and go. Roger Mills was there all the time. I know you did an interview with Jack about Modelo, the project that Roger did in the in these projects. And I wish there at that time, but I did not meet the people who were involved in Modelo until a conference many years later. And just the stories were so incredible, incredible how people’s lives changed.

What was called in there was a newscast about it and they called it the wild wild west. That’s what modelo was like the Wild Wild West with drug dealers and shootings and all kinds of things. And to see these women, they were mostly women who were heads of the household, to the children. And at this conference, one of the women said that we all thought that we were third generation welfare recipients. That’s who we thought we were. So that’s how we behaved in the world.

We behave according to how we think of ourselves. And then she said, one of them discovered that they were had a had a program nearby that they could get a GED. A high school certificate, and one by one, they did that. Some of them actually became social workers. Some of them to this day, you can see them on YouTube that they are providing services to other people who are troubled and don’t know who they really are.

Alexandra: Wow. Oh, I didn’t realize that. That’s really interesting.

Where did your professional life take you?

Lori: Ah, good question. Well, there was a very good friend of mine, Hazel Fosse, and people will recognize her name, she’s no longer with us. But Hazel suggested that I get a license as a marriage and family therapist, because that was a way that I could share what I had learned and what was helping me so much, and all of my relationships. And so I did that. I followed her suggestion, how to get some extra courses and, and do an internship.

I spent a year at the Advanced Human Studies Institute after my year training as a counselor. And I got a license as a marriage and family therapist. And that’s pretty much where you know what I’ve been doing ever since.

Alexandra: Let’s back up a little bit.

Tell me a little bit about what your life was like before you learned about this understanding, before you met Sydney Banks. And then what it was like after.

Lori: Well, that’s another great question, because I didn’t realize that I was depressed. I had a lot of fun, being an art teacher and being in Boston at the time, and I had friends and boyfriends. But in my master’s program, it was recommended that we all get into therapy. So I did that. I got a diagnosis. I got a diagnosis.

They sent me to the Jung Institute in San Francisco. I took a battery of tests, and they came out with dysthymia and long term depression. So that explained to me that everybody’s life was not difficult. Right, I guess so then I started to think, Oh, I really have a problem. And so you can imagine what a relief it was to be around other people who were learning from Syd, learning that there’s no such thing. There’s no such thing as mental health disorders.

There’s a wonderful book coming out about that and when I was entering this world of therapy, in order for people’s insurance to pay therapists, you have to give them a diagnosis. I was so against that. But I discovered I could use a diagnosis called the adjustment disorder. And I tell people, that’s the diagnosis I use because we all go through adjustments in life.

I’ll never forget what Syd said. He said that, in the future there will be one diagnosis to us. And it will be the misuse of the ability to think. And that made perfect sense to me because I did not go from having a label as depressed to going to having a pretty carefree life. I can’t say some of it was overnight, but over the years, it just keeps getting better. Because I see when I get tangled up in my personal thinking, and I let it go it’s like, why would you hold onto a hot rock? Can you drop it, you’d let it go? Because you don’t want it to burn your hand?

It’s the same thing with thinking that there’s something wrong with you and thinking about all the things you don’t like, and all the judgments and expectations we take on about how life is supposed to be. And to find out that it’s all coming from me. The outside world is not telling me that I’m not good enough, or there’s something wrong with well, so I’m for people diagnose if somebody else is telling me there’s something wrong with me. So it was me telling myself a lot of hogwash, and believing it.

I sometimes get these thoughts, well, you could do better but then I don’t have to believe it. I don’t have to act as though that’s who I am. It’s not who I am. And that’s really what I came to see is that we all, everybody has, in essence, a spiritual essence that goes far beyond what we concoct with our brain with our ability to think.

We have this amazing ability to think. I couldn’t be here with you if I couldn’t think my way here. But boy, do we use it against ourselves unnecessarily and, and to wake up to that, and there’s not a person in this world, no matter what their circumstances have been. Because I’ve worked with people with the most unbelievable traumatic events in their past. And they see through it, that that’s over. And, in fact, they wake up to the fact that they have what it took to get to go beyond it, to get past it to leave it behind them.

Alexandra: You mentioned going into marriage and family therapy, and I saw this mentioned on your website that one of the things you want couples to learn is that they don’t need to work on their relationship. And so tell us about that.

It sounds so contrary to the standard way that people go when they are having trouble in their relationship.

Lori: Oh, yeah. It’s the standard way, right? Couples come in, and will write to me or they’ll contact me we have to work on our relationship. And when I get to talk to them, I can explain to them that the idea of working on anything, is typically not very pleasant. That you have to do something that you don’t really want to do.

So, when anybody learns that, it just takes getting back into a quiet mind. A quiet state of mind that’s not judging their partner, that’s not blaming the other person. Because the judgment and blame is coming from us, from the thinker. It doesn’t come from out there. It doesn’t come from another person doesn’t even come from an event. I mean, bad things happen. But it’s how we think about it. And how long we choose to think about something that we can’t fix.

Alexandra: Does this idea really surprise couples at first?

Lori: Some but some it lands on them like it makes perfect sense, yeah, we’ve been thinking that we’re really in trouble. And we have to do something that’s going to be awful and time consuming and expensive. And so they build up this aversion to him even talking to me. And an aversion to talking to each other. Leave that, in, that’s just really something now, people will be show afraid to talk to their partner. And there is not anything that a person has to be afraid to share when they’re in a loving, peaceful state of mind.

Alexandra: I imagine if you’re seeing that the relationship is a problem and then going in and talking about it, of course, that would feel yucky. It wouldn’t feel like a good thing to do.

I imagine when people see the difference of going into something with a calm, quiet, state of mind must be quite revelatory.

Lori: When you think about it, that, like you say, a problem. If people think that they have a problem, it’s just going to get them all worked up and get them thinking about whatever they think the problem is. But people can relate to this, because they know that they have had moments where they weren’t thinking problems. And it was like, they fell back in love with their partner. Yeah, out of the blue, that their head clears, their mind clears and they get a feeling of falling back in love. This love is always there.

We’ve all heard not just in the Three Principles community, but in so many spiritual communities that that’s where we are. And we can witness that. When you look at children and babies. They go right back into love.

Alexandra: Yes. Right.

Lori: They go right back. They cry, they need their diaper changed. They’re hungry. That’s taken care of. And then they’re just smiling. Nobody teaches babies to smile. Where does that come from?

Alexandra: And you know what it occurs to me, there’s that famous couples therapist, and the name is escaping me right now, who had the Love Lab in Seattle? Do you know who I’m talking about? Well, I shouldn’t have brought it up. Anyway.

They said that they could observe people in couples, and they could tell if the couple would last, or if they wouldn’t, just by observing them for a while, a day or two. And the premise was that the people would kind of come to the relationship from a loving place, is what I’m seeing now. But what came out of it was they created a system for kind of doing that artificially.

I think what I’m seeing is that they had seen what we’re talking about, and sort of we’re just framing it slightly differently.

Lori: I do you know what you’re referring to, okay and they were observing couples who were angry at each other. And then they would say, well, this couple isn’t going to last not realizing that it’s a temporary condition. And when they observed couples who loved each other, even though they were mad at each other, they would say, Well, I love him to death, but he really upsets me.

And they had the idea that that would last and like you said, they started to try to create that artificially. Like we call that outside-in in the Three Principles community because it’s trying to use a technique or create something that’s not coming from them.

That’s why it’s such a paradigm shift in psychology that recognizing that everything, The Good, the Bad, the Ugly, is coming from us. Whatever thinking we’re in, yes, you can’t get away from your thinking, but you can realize that it’s like you just got on the wrong thought wave. Like getting on the wrong bus. You get on a better bus that’s going to take you to a better part of town, where you want to be?

Alexandra: That’s such a good analogy. I love that.

One of the things that you also mentioned on your website is that we are expressions of universal love. You’ve touched on this with the analogy about babies. And how when we know this, it can ease our suffering.

Could you talk about that a little bit?

Lori: I love that question. When you realize that you already are – you could call that universal love. – you’re not looking for somebody else to complete you. To give you love. You already have all the love you ever need.

Is it wonderful to be in a loving relationship, exchanging the feelings of love? Sharing the feelings of love? Absolutely. But it’s not necessary to have a beautiful life, because you we already have everything we need.

So it’s impossible to blame somebody if I’m not feeling good. Makes no sense. Who am I going to blame about that? Now I could look at the person and who’s saying nasty things to me. And I could say, well, of course, I feel bad because he or she is saying something really nasty. But it doesn’t tell me that anymore.

What it tells me is the state of mind that that person is in. I know you’ve seen this, too, that you could still love somebody who’s saying something nasty to you, because it doesn’t say anything about you. It just tells you the state of mind of the speaker. And you want to love them more than because you feel bad for them that they’re a bad state.

Alexandra: I love that and I love that you said we always have all the love we need. That’s such an important point.

Coming to a relationship with that awareness, I imagine, it’s like having a completely full cup, as coaches say. You’re completely filled up yourself. And I just imagine that that changes the dynamics of a relationship so much.

People wouldn’t be looking for the other person to be all the things they need them to be.

Lori: Right. I hear a lot from couples about how one feels controlled by the other. And when that person labeled as controlling, realizes that they don’t need their partner to be a certain way in order to live a nice life. Then they can let their partner live their life the way they should live in. They’re not dependent on how their partner lives their life.

Alexandra: It’s just lovely.

I’m assuming you see transformation in relationships when people start to get this.

Lori: Yes, especially I would have to say the old therapy model is one hour a week. And what happens with couples that they’ll wake up during a session if they come one hour a week. And then they go about their lives. And they’re sucked back into the prevalent thinking in society, which is, before this paradigm shift, which is out there, we have to fix what’s out there, we have to fix the other person. So it’s almost like a rubber band.

But when people come for longer stretches of time, that makes the big difference. And when they come to like for an intensive, it’s called different things, retreat. I like that. I like that term. So they’ll come for even just three, four days, sometimes longer, but three, four days in a row, and I will work specifically with them. That makes the biggest difference, then they go back and the world is still the way it is, but they don’t get sucked into it. Because they’ve really seen what a difference it makes to just really be in the best state of mind that they can find in any given moment. And nobody’s there 100% of the time but when we’re not there, we know to not take ourselves so seriously.

Alexandra: I was going to say over the course of three or four days, there would be that natural ebb and flow of our state of mind. And I imagine you can point out to them, though, this is what’s happening.

Lori: Exactly. Even in an hour session, there’s an ebb and flow. And I can point out to them, you see how the differences right now, are you feeling? Yeah, that’s a good point. Because people don’t realize, when they go into the lower stage, or into a higher state of mind, they don’t realize it until it’s pointed out to them. It’s like riding an elevator of life.

Alexandra: What do you think is our biggest misunderstanding about being in a relationship?

Lori: I think that people don’t realize how much they want a connection. Everybody wants a connection. As they felt connected in the beginning where they wouldn’t still be together. And then they lose the connection because of expectations and dissatisfactions and judgments and criticisms. And then show connection is what people are looking for. And they don’t realize that they’re the ones that are creating the disconnect. Again, so now it’s coming from them.

And another thing I’ll mention too, which was fun, it’s in the book that I co-authored with Christine, The Secret of Love, that we both laughed, because we’re both marriage and family therapists. And people always come to us saying that we have to work on our communication skills, that’s been the catchphrase in society for so long.

And it’s erroneous, it’s wrong. It’s not communication. It’s listening. People don’t have a problem communicating, they communicate when they’re angry. And it’s a whole different thing when you communicate when you’re in a nice state of mind.

Alexandra: Yes, I can see that when we’re in a low state of mind. We tend to get really chatty, I know, I do. I go on and on and on and I can feel my mind circling back around to the beginning of an argument when it gets to the end. And you’re right, it’s the listening, though, that makes the big difference.

One other question, I want to ask you about relationships.

Do you think it’s possible to create positive change if only one person in the couple is interested in this understanding?

Lori: Another great question. Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. And the perfect example of that is the very first chapter in The Secret of Love. And it’s on Chip and Jan, the couple and from Saltspring. They talk about this on YouTube videos. So it’s it publicly known that Chip was very resistant. Jan just saw something so deep when she heard talks by Syd Banks, it just kept getting reinforced more and more for her that her state of mind was everything.

Even when he was out of sorts, that she might get into an argument for a moment and quickly say that’s it. I’m not doing this with you. So let’s talk later, when we’re both feeling better, and she go off she do her thing and, and come back and over a period of time, and it wasn’t right away.

Chip himself said that he was very stubborn. He would say, I don’t want to know about this thought business. I don’t want to hear about it. But something clicked somewhere along the way.

Alexandra: Oh, that’s so great. And because it’s inside out, it has to do with ourselves and our thinking that even if the other person never came on board, it would still make a huge difference to the to the one person who is exploring this.

Lori: Absolutely. So that’s also part of expectation, not expecting the other person to have a higher state of mind to be in a nice, loving, calm, peaceful state. You’d be where you want to be without needing the other person to be anywhere other than where they are in the moment.

Alexandra: I imagine that has an effect too, on the other partner. Someone I interviewed recently on the podcast, referred to it as a tuning fork.

If my vibration has changed, and it’s peaceful and calm, that probably has an effect on the other person in the relationship.

Lori: Right. And then every so often, you’ll hear well, I want some of that. Show me what you’re learning. That’s what happened to me when I saw my boyfriend’s state of mind. And that’s when I got involved. And I said, Okay, I’m going to do a year – and it doesn’t take a year anymore. Back then we had no resources, there was no videos there.

Today, there’s just so much. People don’t have to move from West Coast to East Coast. And the group of us would travel to hear said, wherever he was speaking, and now you could just sit in your living room and turn on YouTube. A whole different world.

Alexandra: I’m so grateful for technology, the way that it can share everywhere all over the world. It’s lovely.

You have you potentially have a new podcast coming up for single people. Tell us about that.

Lori: Somebody else came up with the name and I love it. It’s called Taking the BS out of Being Single. And that was an outgrowth from a course that I do called Finding Deep Connections. And that’s for single people as well.

Single people have a lot of thinking about why they need to be single, why they don’t want to be single, why they shouldn’t be single. There’s a lot of thinking going on in that world. As a marriage and family therapist, and just a person living in life, to see that it’s always a relationship with our own thinking. Whether we’re single partner married, married for 40 years, it’s always the relationship we have with our own thinking. The person is next to us, or a 100 miles away.

It’s so simple. So maybe it’ll just be one episode of the podcast. That’d be it. It’s your relationship with your thinking. There you go.

Alexandra: As we begin to wrap up here, is there anything that we haven’t touched on that you would like to share?

Lori: I don’t think so. You really covered so much. Maybe just if I could tie it together.

Everything we talked about is in relationship with their own thinking, the state of which is the state of mind we live in. And it’s understanding how that works, how we work as thinking beings, given an amazing gift to think. And the free will to think up, down or sideways.

We have the free will when I’ve had clients who say sometimes I just want to be bummed out, and I hang out there for a while. And I say, Great, as long as you know that it’s you’re choosing that. There’s no judgment. No judgment. But the trick is knowing that somebody is not bummed out because of what somebody said to them, or a situation or an event. We’ve seen people rise above situations that are beyond imagination.

Alexandra: Thank you for pulling that all together. That’s great.

Where can we find out more about you in your work?

Lori: Well, my website is under construction right now. It’s going through a lift since it’s been around for a long time. And I kept adding things to it. And now it’s all over the place. So we’re pulling it all together. But it is 3principlestherapy.com.

Alexandra: Perfect, okay. And I will put links in the show notes. And so people will be able to find it there. And your book is called The Secret of Love.

Lori: Unlock the Mystery, Unleash the Magic. There’s another book on Amazon called The Secret of Love, and it’s a romance novel.

Alexandra: Thank you so much, Laurie. It’s been so great chatting with you today.

Lori: I really enjoyed it, too. Thank you for inviting me.

Alexandra: My pleasure. All right. Take care. Bye. Bye.

Lori: Bye bye. Thank you.

Featured image photo by Daniel Mirlea on Unsplash

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