The Scare(city) of Love

When you hear the word LOVE, what comes up for you? What sensations do you feel? Where do you feel them? Does your heart begin to race, your breath become more rapid, butterflies flutter in your stomach? Or does your breath catch in your throat, your stomach become a twisted knot, and an overwhelming urgency to run overtake you?

Love has an infinite number of meanings, sensations, expressions, and gestures. How we experience love, how we feel loved and offer love, how we dance the dance of love is unique to each of us. It’s our snowflake, our fingerprint, our unique combination of life experience, family culture, personality, and attachment style.

When I work with clients learning to identify their feelings, we begin with working on feeling the sensation and paring the sensation with a feeling word. We engage the amygdala emotional center of the brain and then the prefrontal cortex logical center of the brain. We feel the feeling, name the feeling, then talk about what they think of the feeling. Sometimes we talk about how they feel about the feeling and become curious about metaemotions- how we feel about the feelings we have. More about that in a moment.

I am a firm believer that the universe offers us just what we need right when we need it. It’s up to us to be open to seeing what is placed in front of us. Over the past few weeks in my personal life, the universe has brought me many moments of love. Moments in which love has come in the form of friendship, nurturing, comfort. Moments in which love has come in the form of a kind word from a stranger, the sharing of a meal, smiles and wags and snuggles from my fur baby.

These moments have been moments of joy and happiness, an easing of the burdens and busyness of everyday life. Yet, there have been moments of melancholy as well. These moments stemming from the moments of distress, unease, conflict in events in the world and society, for my clients in their lives, and for me in mine. Those are a form of love, too. More about that in a moment.

An icebreaker exercise I ask clients to complete is to create an acrostic of the word LOVE. I ask them to choose a word or thought they associate with love that begins with each letter of the work LOVE. For my therapy practice, it goes like this:

•  Leaving behind what no longer serves or supports you
• Openness to new ways of thinking, feeling, and relating
• Vulnerability as a strength that builds trust and intimacy
• Embracing new choices that lead to lasting love and connection

This exercise is a great starting point for exploring their views of love. Why were those specific words or thoughts chosen? What is the story behind that choice? A past or current relationship? Family of origin, perhaps? Maybe a hope for the future? What are the emotional themes emerging in these ideas? The most common responses included themes of a desire to love and be loved, a fear to allow oneself to fully and deeply love, and thus an emptiness and longing that reside deep within for years or a lifetime. 

This takes us back to those places I promised we would revisit- metaemotions and how we unexpectedly feel love in feelings. We have feelings about our feelings. For example, we might feel excited about our upcoming birthday and happy as we enjoy the excitement and anticipation. We are happy to feel excited!  Make sense? We could also feel down about our upcoming birthday because we don’t have close friends who want to celebrate the moment with us and that results in loneliness. We feel down about the loneliness in our lives. Make sense?

Knowing how we feel about our feelings becomes the platform for making decisions about the feelings. Follow me through the questions, one at a time:

*What do I want to do with happy?

*What’s my goal for that emotion? Maybe just relax and take it all in? How do I do that? 

*What’s a small step I can take to reach that goal? Maybe I start by giving myself permission to believe I am worthy of the affection being shown to me, or perhaps I tell myself to sit back and let others be in charge right now as plans are made.

* What do I want to do with down?

*What’s my goal for that emotion? Feel better? How do I do that?

*What small step can I take? Go for a walk and get fresh air? Find a group to join? Perhaps have a check up or do some individual therapy as a starting place for creating the healthy, balanced life I would like to experience?

Love has been in my face, eyeball to eyeball, with me for the past few weeks. I put myself through this same exercise of thinking about what love means to me, what the feelings want me to know, identifying small actions I can take. And this is what has occurred to me…

Love comes in the most unexpected ways. Love is in abundance- it is not scarce. It’s our hesitancy, our fear, of being open to expressing and receiving love in which scarcity makes itself felt. And, love can feel scary. And when we are scared of our feelings, we put up our walls and make ourselves scarce. We miss loving and feeling loved because of the scarcity we create when we are scared. A never-ending loop of loneliness and emptiness.

Loving and feeling loved require vulnerability. Love requires- it demands with all its might– that we let our walls down and be open to rejection, shame, judgment, abandonment. Love and loving require us to be courageous, strong, brave in our vulnerability. These qualities create a loop of abundance in offering and receiving love in a life that is fulfilling, not lonely or empty.

Love asked me to believe that the kindness of friends and strangers was genuine, well-intentioned, and compassionate. Love also asked me to recognize melancholy as an indicator that someone, something I care about is hurting. And that I feel that hurt within myself because I am able to fully love and feel the joy as well as the loss, the pain, the compassion and empathy for people-including myself- who are hurting.

Love can be scary, without a doubt! But love is not scarce. Love is everywhere when we open ourselves to all the forms it takes. Where have you been looking for love and not found what you have wanted to experience? What are the places, the moments, in which love is fully in front of you but looks different than expected? How can you open yourself to fully embrace those moments? How can these help you move through love being scary and therefore scarce into love is abundant in all its forms?

Feel the feeling of love, take the next step, embrace all that awaits you!

As always,

Embrace your best self!  Anne