HappyComeLucky

“We waste time looking for the perfect lover, instead of creating the perfect love.”

Tom Robbins

I have a confession. I have started writing this post with no idea of whether I will get to the end of it, and if I do, whether I will hit publish. If you’re reading this, then I must have done.

I’ve already written and deleted a version of this. I had to let the thoughts around why I deleted it sit with me for a while as I had acted out of instinct rather than consideration. As the rush of discomforted feelings subsided, I realised that I had strayed into vulnerable territory of a new layer of understanding of myself.

So, here goes. First of all. Love is really important to me. I love fiercely and passionately. I love easily. I don’t ration or protect the love that I give. I’m demonstrative in my love and I hope the people who I love know that I love them. The only people who I try not to tell that I love them are people who feel uncomfortable when I use those words.

Love for me, is something that I give. I give it without expectation and without any need for reciprocity. My love is infinite so it isn’t something that is divided and parcelled out. I love different people in different ways and with different intensities and my life is made rich by the people I love.

I know that I am loved. I feel loved. The feeling of being cared about and loved is such a wonderful thing. It’s powerful and there have been times when I have been scared of it and found it hard to accept.

Realising this has made me reflect on why that was and which of my emotional reactions are still rooted in that place.

I’ve mentioned before that I have trauma from my childhood and that I am a work in progress in dealing with that. The combination of being groomed and abused, alongside a strange parenting style where my position in my parents’ hierarchy of love was made clear to me meant that I developed a lot of safety behaviours to protect myself. One of those was to not seek reassurance about being cared for, being important of being loved. I still remember the pain of having sought that reassurance when young and being told that my parents’ love for me was not unconditional and unbounded.

Being told that I was loved as a child was often as part of manipulation to make me do things, or as a guilt trip for having done something bad. It’s not surprising that deep down, I developed the idea that if someone said they loved me, that was someone who I then had to be careful not to be a nuisance to. I had to be careful not to worry them because the other thing that I had learnt about being ‘loved’ as a child is that my base level of existence varied between problematic and something that could be put up with, and that anything that indicated that I needed more of anything moved me into a nuisance category.

It is the power of friendship, especially persistently wonderful friends that have finally cracked through those thoughts. Friends who aren’t there because they have to be. Friends who don’t feel that they have to put up with me. Friends who are awesome and persistent enough to poke me, listen to me, notice me and talk to me and go out of their way to do those things. Even when I am low, my past trauma can no longer persuade me that they are just being nice. When I am cared about and loved, it now fills me with warmth instead of worry. I feel love rather than my previous experiences of hearing that I was loved.

I’d love to get out pompoms and tassels and so some amazing celebratory dance about how ‘fixed’ I am but I still have a bit more to go before that.

I believe I am loved and I feel loved. Opening myself up to that feeling has made me vulnerable. Being vulnerable can be scary and those older thought patterns are still there in the background.

I have realised that opening myself up to feeling loved means that I also need reassurance. I don’t need extreme levels of reassurance and under normal circumstances, seeing those people gives me that reassurance through connection. Phone calls, pictures and shared moments help too. This year has been tricky. There is so much stress and, of course, I haven’t been able to spend time with lovers and partners. There are times when I’m low and my thoughts stray back closer to my old safety behaviours that I start to feel that I am unlovable. In the absence of being able to see people face to face, it’s hard to challenge that feeling.

That’s when I need reassurance. And I know that I only have to ask and I will be given that reassurance because my partners are wonderful people. But that’s where the effects of my past really suck. I can’t make myself ask. I’ve got better at letting my partners know when I am struggling but asking them to reassure me that I am important to them feels as terrifying to do as facing one of my phobias. I know that it is possible but each time I try, I recoil from it. The emotional scars from it going wrong when I asked and immediately becoming a nuisance are not healed enough to take the risk yet.

So, if I care about you, love you, have a place for you in my heart, I will tell you in lots of ways. But for now, I am unlikely to be asking you to tell me how you feel about me and if I do, I’ll have screwed myself up inside and out before asking and probably wished a hundred times that I hadn’t while I wait for an answer.

Love makes us vulnerable as the same time as it makes us invincible.