Self Love: The Key to Breaking the Fear Barrier to Feel Safe Enough Love
The biggest obstacle to cultivating the authentic intimacy you desire is a part of yourself you do not love. These are hidden parts. Parts you do not fully accepted, perhaps parts of you that are disowned rejected or shamed by a parent when you were a small. They can also be parts you fear would cause conflict or anger. These subconscious parts of you, essentially, are the main obstacles to forming and enjoying the healthy, loving, mutually enriching couple relationship you desire.
These hidden aspects of yourself are powerful shapers of your life. These aspects operate subconsciously. They are outside of your awareness. Even if you wake up tomorrow morning to find that your partner is “exactly” how you want them to be and your relationship instantly changes, you will not likely be able to sustain the changes long enough to enjoy them.
In truth, these unloved parts would not like it, feel “uncomfortable” at best with this unfamiliar territory. You would most likely begin to act quickly to return your relationship back to what you had before.
Self-sabotage — not!
Though some call this “self-sabotage,” it really isn’t.
These hidden parts of you are controlled by a part of your mind known as the subconscious. It is responsible for managing all processes of your mind and body. These are the things that you do not have to think about with your “conscious” mind. The part that does conscious thinking, makes plans, decisions, and so on.
Your subconscious mind monitors all systems 24/7. It never rests. It isn’t self-sabotage because the main directives of this operating system are always set on restoring balance, health and ensuring your survival.
Its primary directive however, is to ensure survival. Unlike the conscious mind, since it does not reflective “thinking” of its own. It does not know the difference between physical and psychological threats to your survival! That means: It relies on information from you, at any given moment, to interpret life around you. Especially in terms of threats to your emotional survival, which is as real and conceivably more intensely guarded than physical survival.
The greatest fear?
It’s safe to say that our greatest fear is intimacy. And, as any creative process, intimacy is a balancing act. It is the art of balancing our drive for meaningful connection and self-agency. These drives activate core human fears, such as rejection and inadequacy. These areas have to do with the natural doubts and anxiety we feel either about our ability to handle closeness or distance.
And thus, we take actions that are in effect “harmful” to our relationship. However, they are not “self-sabotage” or “self-destructive” per se. They are rather misguided ways that our subconscious mind “thinks” it “has to” protect us in situations that trigger our deepest intimacy fears, and thus, our emotional survival response. If you do not feel safe enough to connect emotionally to your partner, you do not feel safe enough inside to love, period. This is because our body’s fear response shuts us off or overrides our drives to matter. It gives primacy to what “seems” urgent in the moment: your survival, defense, protection.
In these moments, we totally disconnect from our inner sources of love, acceptance, compassion and understanding. We need to know how to restore our own sense of love and safe connection to our self. Instead, we tend to take desperate actions to either distance or get close to our partner. Then, we feel surprised and hurt that, like us, they get scared or thrown off balance by our defensive strategies, protective reactions.
Love is all about safety.
The primary directive of your subconscious mind is your safety. In the case of relationship-building emotional safety. Your body-mind will automatically act to keep anything that resembles a close intimate relationship at bay until it feels you are “capable” of handling your inner emotional response to what triggers your fears, and maintaining your connection to your self.
This explains why it is “impossible” to fully love another person unless you genuinely love your self. This means, knowing how to handle upsetting emotions in certain triggering situations so that your body does not unnecessarily activate your survival response.
As an infant or small child you were totally dependent on your parents as sources of love and thus safety. As adults, you and your partner own 100% responsibility for not unnecessarily activating one another’s survival systems. You absolutely must grow out of, rewire, let go of your early survival-love maps.
Letting go …
Your early survival-love map is a set of beliefs that automatically activate your defenses. This is to protect you from what you believe you cannot handle without these protective strategies. In a sense, you cannot –at least not until you believe you can. That even though you yearn for your partner’s love, recognition, understanding, etc., you are not only worthy of your own unconditional love and acceptance. You only need, require, and must-have your own to restore a sense of balance, health and peace of mind within.
It is these limiting beliefs that are blocking you from the love and connection you need. For example, you may believe that, in order to feel love and acceptance, others in your world “should” appreciate what you do or treat you in specific ways. If not, it means you have no value. These limiting beliefs, and the toxic thinking patterns they produce, can leave you with a sense of feeling unloved, unappreciated, undeserving, and so on, which then keep you spinning your wheels in life, continuously looking for someone or something out there to do what only you can do by deepening your connection to life from within.
It’s the way you and the world of relationships work. Let go of old limiting beliefs, and create your life anew.
Self-love is the solution.
Learning to fully love yourself and life is your job, if you wish to be happy and heathy that is.
As long as you do not love and accept yourself fully, all parts of you, you will likely attract persons into your life that also do not love themselves, albeit in different ways.
Some people do not love themselves by devaluing the uniqueness of their own voice and contribution. They place to much weight and importance on what others believe about them, thus, anxiously base their self worth on what certain others or others in general think or believe about them.
Others do not love themselves by devaluing the unique voice and contribution of others. They anxiously dismiss, deny or ignore others input in order maintain a false sense of their own importance as superior to the other.
Still others, devalue both their own and others unique contribution and value.
All cases are indicative of the absence of genuine self-love and self-acceptance. It is the absence of self-love that anxiously focuses our efforts on waiting for others to give us what we believe we “must” or “should” have before we can be free to feel love and acceptance, value and deserving of love and happiness.
If you do not love yourself for all you are (and are not), is it reasonable to expect the other can do so?
In truth, the intense focus on what the other should or should not do before you can feel loved is a mere distraction. It’s a way to deal with the pain you feel in relation to yourself and those closest to you. It is also a way to avoid the work you need to do on yourself. Work that leads to developing a mature capacity to love and accept yourself and others unconditionally. You can simultaneously create the life and relationships you desire. When you truly love yourself, you also bring out the same qualities in those around you.
