Programmed against love

In essence, we all want to love and be loved in return, don’t we? Then why is it so hard for some of us to actually accept love, to maintain it, to let ourselves be truly loved? If we’re looking for that one person who will show us love and whom we can give all of our love, why are so many people struggling to find them? And why do relationships fail even though in the beginning it was crystal clear to everyone that THIS must be IT. True love.

So, what is this, true love? Is it the one significant other with whom our life will forever be picture perfect? Is it having a family and being loved by your friends, making fun stuff and building memories together? Is it the butterflies we feel when we freshly “fall in love”?

And why are people looking for it forever, and why are many people disappointed after a while, even though they were sure at the beginning that they’ve found their soul mate?

People have dedicated their entire lives to answer questions like these. There are countless books about it. Everybody has to say something about it. Hollywood gives us perfect examples of perfect love. Every good novel has a good love story in it (and so has every bad one, of course). There are numbers of counseling books on how to love, how to find love, how to get someone back who used to love you, how to be a loving and caring person towards others.

I admit it, I’ve read several of these. The questions I have posed above were racing through my mind just as well, and I was desperately looking for answers. It was at a time in my life in which I truly wondered but one thing:Where the frigging hell is the love? That was when I started to actively look for it in my life. I looked for it everywhere, sometimes in a mere frenzy, sometimes hopeless to ever find answers. I read those books, I watched those videos, I made those meditations. And finally, I understood the one, most important thing: Love is not to be found outside of you. You’ve probably heard it once or twice already, and I’m sorry to be the third one telling you this: You have to look inside.You have to “wanna be loved”. Because no one can give all their love to someone who doesn’t want to be loved without getting thoroughly drained. wait, what? Doesn’t want to be loved? Yes, that is a thing.

According to Dr. Joe Dispenza, author of “Breaking the habit of being yourself” and a few other mind-blowing books, our world is built only by our imagination, so in essence, by our thoughts. We get what we broadcast to the field. It’s only logical then that if we broadcast love, we will get love in return.

Of course, we all want and need to be loved. Yet, subconsciously, many of us are programmed to believe that they are not worth to be loved. And in order to feel that programmed feeling again and again, they can’t accept love in their life.

But why would we want to feel that again and again? It’s painful, isn’t it? It tears us apart and brings us down, we despair, and who would want that?

Another thing Dr. Joe emphasizes a lot is that the body likes to live in homeostasis. Things need to be as they are used to be. And feelings create hormones, and after a while, the body gets used to certain hormones and moods, and the mood becomes an attitude, and then it becomes personality.

So if you are used to believing that you’re not good enough, your body will subconsciously do everything in its power to maintain this attitude. Changing it would mean changing you. Your thoughts, your attitudes, your cells, everything. It would disturb homeostasis, and homeostasis doesn’t care if it is good for you or not. It’s like an addiction. The body gets used to the drug and even though your health suffers and you’re on the road to self-destruction – it is what your body knows. It is what your sub-consciousness has been fed with for a very long time.

For a long while, I have been there, too. I couldn’t accept love. I distanced myself from everyone and everything that would involve deeper relationships, love and self-value. Because I knew that I didn’t deserve it. My body knew it. My whole being knew it. There were times, and God knows that they are still haunting me now and then, when I felt like the worst person on earth.

If we feel like this, we can’t feel love, we can’t be loved, love in its all-accepting, unconditional way, doesn’t fit in our world of self-hatred. We constantly find ourselves in situations where our love, our hopes and dreams, get disappointed. And again, we fail, and again we say: See? It doesn’t work for me. And we think: I guess it’s just not for me, I’m not worth it.

As long as we hate ourselves this much, even if only subconsciously, love will never be more than a dream to us. It’s not that love is not there, because, as I mentioned in an earlier post already, the very essence of this world and everything in it, is pure love. It’s just that we can’t feel it.

It doesn’t reach our world. We’ve built ourselves a cave, and sitting in it, we choose to be blind and deaf to other people’s attempts of loving us.

I have been on both sides of this tragedy. I know the story from inside the cave and from the outside. Both sides together taught me one very crucial thing: In this world, there will only ever be but one single person that is capable to break the chains and destroy your cave:

You.

You were afraid of that answer, weren’t you? All those books I’ve mentioned before, the videos, podcasts, everyone who’s talking or writing about love and how to find it – it all comes down to this one answer. If you keep waiting for the prince or the princess that comes along and destroys all the thorns for you and kisses you awake like in that beloved fairytale – you need to remember that it is just this: A fairytale. The answer lies within the castle, and that castle is you.

You need to admit that you’re avoiding love and that it is you who built that cave. You need to know that if you hate yourself, other people’s love will become meaningless to you. We’re all only reflections of each other. And if you hate yourself, you will be convinced that you can only be hated. And whatever other people do or don’t around you will be forever seen through this lens alone.

Until you learn to embrace yourself, to love yourself, give yourself all that you need. It may sound crazy. But the love of your life should be first and foremost YOU. Only then can you let love in.