WHY DON’T I FEEL LOVED?
“Your task is not to seek love, but to merely seek and find all the barriers that you have built around it.” (Rumi)
I am committed to helping you find and remove the barriers that you have erected. In the beginning barriers seemed to provide some degree of safety. Upon examination you find out that it is a “false” sense of safety which confines you to a rigid and narrow pathway in the world.
Over time, the barriers become a prison preventing happiness and the love you yearn for, leaving you feeling discouraged, unseen and unloved. Hopefully as we go along, you will better understand how and why it happened with a determination to resolve the struggle and be your own, sweet loveable self.
Self-Love is a given, our birthright, an inner and outer knowing that we are worthy of love and indeed we come into this world personifying “love”. What causes the forgetting?
Will you commit to claiming the love you deserve and be willing to take the steps to get there. Is what is happening in your life so far is not bringing you the fulfilment of your desires and dreams? Why not? Contemplate what you are doing on a repetitive basis that will not change anything for the better.
It is an awareness and a decision to be devoted to your own happiness even though it will take a little bit of time/exploration as well as consistency. Be curious about the part you play in our experiences. Giving yourself some personal time for basic preparation is crucial at this point, The sequence for the very best outcome and deep change to occur is Awareness/Groundwork, Decision and then Action. If any of these steps are skipped, you will shortchange yourself and the outcome will be muddied.
There are many Obstacles in the way of our feeling love and our allowing ourselves to be loved in return. As we go along, I will share with you ways to start healing this void in your life; how to love yourself step by step until you hopefully have mastery and feel more whole and worthy.
Together we will look at the Psychology of it all and how it adds to our belief of not being good enough or deserving. After helping thousands of women over 40 years as well as doing my personal work, I know it is not as simple as “just do it” or “just love yourself” or we’d all be ecstatically happy. Bear with me as we look under the rocks …it is in the lifting; we expose the truth and stop deceiving even ourselves. The lifting exposes some secrets that we do not realize play a part in keeping us stuck and discouraged.
I listened to a podcast by Bruce Lipton Ph.D. author of Biology of Belief who summed up how it happens to us as well as the extent of the problem in our society. Each one of us has a different, but in many ways similar story. Here is Bruce’s way of summing it up.
“We must learn to love ourselves.
From 80-90% of the population will not test positive for the belief “I love myself.” The primary source of the problem is that as children much of our behavior was criticized by parents and teachers with their belief that they were helping us to become better citizens. Those criticisms were downloaded into our subconscious mind which controls 95% of our behavior. Consequently, this programming causes us to lose self-love because we become “self-critical,” which in turn becomes “self-sabotaging.” To truly experience Love in this lifetime and to thrive through the chaos, we must first experience Self-Love.” (Lipton)
What belief systems have held you back? Mostly, they were really somebody else’s beliefs not suitable for you, passed down when you were so young that you could not express, question or confront…You can do it now! They did not see you fully or could not love you in a way to help you create love of self. When you were learning about life, you took in and absorbed beliefs of the people around you. Nobody helped you to understand your value and importance in the world and how to feel loveable just because you are here, and you are you! Often, our caretakers, being wounded or devalued themselves, could not be there forus in the way we needed to grow into strong, loving, happy people.
In David Brooks new book “How to Know a Person” he quotes a Harvard professor who observed “What the eyes see more deeply, the heart tends to love more tenderly”.
There is within us a hunger, a longing to be seen and to be loved. Without feeling loved or being seen there is a void within that has us believing we are missing an essential ingredient, or something is wrong with us. Often it becomes a craving, that we desperately attempt to fill with wrong relationships, artificial distractions, food, or sabotaging addictions. Our path is clouded and without clarity. Being out of alignment, further complicates our predicament. We feel further and further away from any source of nourishment or real support.
Ah my beloved sisters …how well I know the ache and feeling driven to fill what seems to be missing in all the wrong ways and places. Nothing is missing of course; but to come to that inner knowing is a step by step uncovering for most of us.
After searching and moving forward step by excruciating step to express love and to allow myself to feel loved I know what is possible for every one of us, I had to release the narrow template that we tend to construe as how love is supposed to be. We tend to expect “love” to be external…out there, instead of taking an inward journey. We are so busy looking out with blinders on that we miss the myriad of ways that love is all around us. Many of us think that we must have love by a certain age, in a certain body with a certain look and only then do we consider it “real” love. Have you been guilty of a narrow approach? Where does self-love fit into this picture?
The problem is that even when we supposedly encounter that “special” love we can’t really trust or feel fully worthy of it. You know how it goes, would he/she love me, “if he/ she really knew me? And all the while we fear allowing our authentic self to be known.
Do not lean on the past or the mistakes of self or others. It doesn’t have to take a long time or be as difficult as we tend to make it. It does however, ask you to take some time to be with yourself at as deep a level as you can go right now. Simple, but hard for Women in our culture to do. We are not raised to contemplate. to Journal, to know that we are worthy of time to decide what we need to do to change the tide of our lives. Our time is devalued by our Culture; and unfortunately, by ourselves. We label it self-absorption. “selfish”, waste of time etc.
Women tell me that they felt that they had to hide the fact that they were carving out some time for themselves. When contemplating or reflecting, they felt uneasy to make themselves the focus of attention. they believed they were taking time away from what they “should” be doing. A sad commentary on the value we give ourselves and our time, compared to others. Until we change this experience of self, we cannot have the love we desire.
We can only have in our lives the love commensurate to the level of love we have for ourselves. Cannot be otherwise… And even if we fall in love with someone who desperately loves us, we may not let the love into warm our hearts or if so, only for a while. We may not trust our lovability and worthiness to beable to sustain love, thus leading to sabotaging our relationships.
“We don’t see things as they are, we see things as we are” (Anais Nin)
Many slights can hurt a little girl’s heart and set up some faulty beliefs about herself in seemingly “normal” families. A client told me how her mother didn’t see her once again and took other people’s feelings of comfort over hers. Visiting a neighbor that the child feared due to her crotchety ways, her mother slapped her across the face because she refused to kiss the neighbor when they visited. This mother betrayed her daughter time and time again by not seeing or understanding her needs.
The daughter, a grown woman came to see me. Wondering why she gave too much of herself away in relationships, didn’t feel loved and naturally had trouble with boundaries and trusting others to love her.
Over the years there have been thousands of women feeling unloved and together we have unraveled the obstacles that prevented love from entering to bring a deeper level of their gifts, love, nurturing and tenderness into the world. The world is crying outside your window! Step up and feel with every fiber of your being…tell the world “I count, and you can count on me to bring my love and my special kind of strength/gifts to every situation”.
“We don’t see things as they are, we see things as we are” (Anais Nin)
Start by “pausing” Just as the airliner pauses when it comes to the end of the runway before it takes off …to fly… It is your time for a new beginning… Grab your journal. Write your love story as it is; not as you would wish it to be. Let’s start where you find yourself now! Perfect place …no judgement, just acceptance of what is. A place to pause, anchor to get ready for a new adventure that comes with self-love and self -compassion.
To be continued.