104: When Love Feels Hard when Life Looks Fine with Marina Love

In this episode of Revolutionise Your Love Life, Heather Garbutt sits down with Marina Love, a solution-focused hypnotherapist who works with high-achieving, self-aware people who look “fine” on the outside but feel overwhelmed, stuck or emotionally drained on the inside. Together they explore why relationships can start to feel like hard work when your life is ticking along, and how chronic low-level stress quietly pushes the nervous system into survival mode. Marina explains how fight, flight and freeze show up in everyday relating, why the brain becomes hypervigilant and obsessive when it senses threat, and how small, practical steps can rewire the brain towards calm, connection and emotional presence. More resources and episodes are available at Heathergarbutt.com.

Key takeaways

• Coping isn’t the same as calm. Stress can build slowly as a “low hum” under life’s demands, leaving you surviving rather than thriving, even when everything looks OK on paper.
• Survival mode makes love feel threatening. When the nervous system is overloaded, the brain scans for danger, reads meaning into tiny cues, and can turn partners into “intimate enemies”.
• Fight, flight, freeze shows up in relationships. Arguments, withdrawal, people-pleasing, avoidance, overthinking and emotional distance often map directly to threat responses, not “personality flaws”.
• Your brain can’t tell imagination from reality. Under stress, the mind creates scenarios, then the body reacts as if they are true, fuelling adrenaline, cortisol, guilt and shame.
• Small actions change the chemistry. Practical, manageable steps build momentum and dopamine (reward and progress), reduce cortisol, and help the thinking brain come back online, improving communication and connection.

Mentioned in this episode

• Solution-focused hypnotherapy (future-focused, practical, nervous-system calming work)
• The role of dopamine (progress/reward) vs cortisol/adrenaline (stress response)

About Marina:
Marina Love is a solution-focused hypnotherapist supporting high-achieving, self-aware clients who feel capable externally but internally overwhelmed, stuck or emotionally depleted, often noticing the impact most strongly in relationships. Her work is grounded in neuroscience, nervous system regulation, and practical steps that help clients move out of survival mode into a calmer, more energised and emotionally present way of living, without needing to revisit the past.

About Heather:
I married at 34 with great hope for a long, happy marriage and a family. Over time, though, the relationship unraveled into power struggles, criticism and emotional distance. My own childhood conditioning had left me disconnected from my feelings and needs and despite years of personal work, I couldn’t see a way forward. We separated in 2007.

I stayed on my own for several years, not wanting to repeat the pattern again. In 2016 my life transformed. Through discovering Katherine Woodward Thomas’s work, I called in my “One.” Although I was already a trained psychotherapist and deeply committed to self-development, this work created breakthroughs I hadn’t experienced before. To give my new relationship the strongest foundation possible, I trained as both a Conscious Uncoupling and Calling in “The One” coach. Through that process, I learned to honour myself more fully and to build love rooted in trust, presence and emotional truth.

As a psychotherapist of over 35 years, I was genuinely surprised to discover through this work, entirely new levels of insight, empowerment and relational skills, insights I now live and practice within my own relationship.
Whether you are recently separated, healing unresolved pain from the past, or longing to create a deeply nourishing relationship, I would be honoured to support you.

Together, we can help you reconnect with your authentic self and open the door to lasting, meaningful love.

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