What's your strategy to get the love you want?
He touched something deep at a meditation retreat. When he was really young, he lost one of his parents and convinced himself that people he loves will always leave him.
At a glance it might not look like it's a big issue, but let’s examine some of the ways in which this is projected in life.
It’s now 35 years later, He is in an intimate relationship where he plays the role of a good man and a good father. He does everything he thinks would please his partner. He goes out of his way to have the love he wants. A lot of the times it is to disprove his belief that people he love will leave him, most of the time it is at the cost of his own authenticity.
Underneath it all, he craves something else, he craves being honest and authentic. His partners feels it too, but not necessarily able to put it all in words.
They are both so engrossed in these roles that they don’t have enough attention on what is happening underneath the surface. She wants access to his authenticity and he is so far detached from himself that he doesn’t even know what is real and what isn’t. This make belief world is what he knows as reality now.
Over a period of time, which is usually once the honeymoon period is over, they both start to feel miserable. Yet, keeping the façade and the story alive. They build coping mechanisms - keep themselves busy with work, children, friends, holidays, social engagements; and yet they are both angry at themselves for not being able to say the honest thing, which is what they ultimately crave, and the only way that anger comes out is pointing fingers at the other person for making them feel that way.
On one hand he is doing all of this so that the woman he loves doesn’t leave him, and, on the other, he is doing all of it to prove to himself that the woman he loves will leave him because that’s what happens - people he loves will always leave him.
This is not just true in his intimate relationships though. It is only true everywhere else in his life as well. He has built a whole new personality to get the love he wants because he think he can’t have the love just by being himself.
It is this fear of abandonment that drives him to live an inauthentic and dishonest life and creates an illusion that he will be protected from his fear and at the same time getting closer and closer to proving that his fear is real, just like it has always been - every. single. time.
We all have some version of this story in our lives when we made up our minds about how the world is or what our relationship to the world looks like.
We build persona’s to avoid feeling that fear while doing everything to prove that the fear we feel is always right. It’s a vicious circle.
So, what is the answer? How do we break out of this cycle?
Well, the first thing is to wake up to the fact that we are in a vicious circle and understand our version of it
Develop practices that help us examine our reality and understand if an underlying fear is driving us
We cannot see our own blind spots. Hire someone to do that for you, or put yourself in a situation where you can become aware of these spots
Learn to love yourself. This is a process and you are exactly where you are supposed to be!
