I guess you are all thinking What The?  How can I say that about love, love is meant to be a nice warm, fuzzy thing.  So let me explain.

Make no mistake love is the most magical and powerful energy on the planet.  Love is something that we all crave, but at the same time many of us are terrified of love.  Many of us don’t trust love that much either.  You see love also appears to have a shadow side.  We have all been subjected to imperfect love, when our loved ones have betrayed us, lied to us and left us feeling like a fool to have believed in love.  Most of us at some time have experienced the downer of no love!

Be Gentle, Nurture Yourself

We all come in with the capacity for unconditional love, the kind of love that accepts our parents no matter what.  In fact love is the very first addiction we experience.  We seek out the gentle touch, the soothing words and the gentle caress.  It seems that we have an insatiable desire for love when we are young.  It is very likely that we would die if we did not receive it at all. We do everything possible to get our fix from the adults around us.  For some of us our first love affair last a lifetime. Eventually the addictive quality of the behaviour –  “I have to get love from my parents” tends to wain and become a mature love wherein love gains the capacity to become a process of exchange. Loves powerful addictive nature begins to fade.  It’s not that we no longer want it, but we relax into it knowing it will always be there.  The highs and low mostly mellow into a continuous wave.

Mature love understands that love comes from within and it can never be taken from us.  Once we deeply realise that love is within and doesn’t need to be topped up we can become free of the addictive nature of first love. We come to understand that the exquisite feeling of love is within us all the time we just need to tune in. Most of us have experienced the giddy and legless feeling of falling in love one or more times after our first love – our parents.  But just like the first time addiction eventually gives way to mature love.  If we don’t understand this we will continually seek out the heady first love experience and feel that love has gone when it disappears.

Unfortunately for many of us the shadow of conditional love creeps over us and we find it harder and harder to get our love hit.  In actual fact we can unconsciously believe and act in many ways that negate the feel good “‘cos I am loved feeling” simply because we don’t trust the words of love.  Many times I have heard these sad words from my clients:  “They are only saying that they love me or that I am beautiful they want something from me” or because “love makes them blind to see who I really am or what I really look like”.  Or another good one is; “they only say good things about me because they are my father, mother, spouse etc and that is what they are meant to do”.

So what am I saying here? It is very likely that many of us have standing near us the most awesome love. Yet we don’t trust the words of love or we prefer to believe that love is blind, self-motivated and clearly love cannot see the real truth of us.  When I confront my clients with “so you are saying that your loved one is a liar and most certainly blind?” The response I get is complete surprise.  Their minds do a double take.  The real issue is not that they are lying or blind because they love us.  It is because all of us at some time have felt hurt by love. Our own illusion of the loved one being perfect has come crashing down and we never repaired the damage.  It’s a similar to the process we experience with an addictive substance, the very first time can never be reproduced and the comedown is a real nightmare.

Let me be the first to say that there are certainly people who are good a lying and telling us what we want to hear because they want to use and abuse us.  Our desire for love and acceptance can cause us to look for love in the wrong place. Sadly many have traded their addiction for love for substances of addiction.  Unfortunately these substances and behaviours also bring them pain and despair just as people have.  Erroneously we believe that we have more control over these substitute substances and things than we do over people.

So what are we to do?  Well, what if love never came from outside and our capacity to feel love first came from within us? Consider that the kind and type and depth of love we experience on the outside world has more to do with us than them?  So the questions becomes how much do I actually love myself? How do I express my love?  Do I abandon myself?  Lie to myself?  How much love do I allow myself to feel and how much do I allow myself to respond to love?

Most of us live in the illusionary world that everything is outside of us and that everything outside of us is responsible for making us feel or not.  When we take a pain killer, we expect it to work to have power over us and consequently dull the pain. Have you ever taken a pain killing drug that didn’t work?  I have!  So then you have to dig deep inside and find that place of no pain.  Love is the same there is no magical drug, person, thing or behaviour that is going to make you feel loved.

It is all up to you!

Fortunately if you have forgotten your first love, even before your parents I would love to help you find YOU again.