Love is the highest power on earth. It’s what makes the world go round. It is the greatest healer! It is what brings us together. But sometimes it feels like love is what tears us apart. What do we do when love hurts? What do we do when we find ourselves hurting like we have never hurt before. What do we do when it feels our heart has been ripped out; when we feel love has betrayed us. Where do we go from here?
In my life there are people whose behavior has been extremely hurtful towards me. They perceive me in a way that has nothing to do with who I am and how I am showing up. Their perceptions of me are projections of their own wounds and insecurities. But I am powerless to do anything about it. How people treat you is about them, not you. So, we must surrender, and in many cases admit we are powerless to change the situation. We must accept that the one who is cruel and unloving towards us may never change their tune.
In the twelve-step program in alcoholics anonymous and other recovery programs, the first step is admitting one’s powerlessness over the drug, the alcohol, the food, or the attempts to control others behavior. We admit we are powerless!
Although, at times, I admit I am powerless to change how people feel about me, there is a part of me that still believes that with enough love, I can bring about another reality. There is a part of me that still believes I can change how I am perceived. But perception is in the eye of the beholder. Some people are very much invested in the way they perceive you because there is a payoff for them.
In toxic situations, the payoff for the one who perceives you in a negative light, is that they get to feel better about themselves. Often at the core of such dynamics is a person, or several people who have not faced their own insecurities or self-loathing and so they project it onto others. They have an unconscious desire to make others hurt the way they themselves are hurting. I say unconscious because most often they are not aware of their own inner struggles and challenges. They are blind to the insecurities that cause their behavior.
On a psychological note, I am aware of all this. I teach it! I know this dynamic inside out and backwards. But does having this awareness really make the pain go away? Sometimes it soothes the pain a bit. But acknowledging that others lash out at me because of their own pain, doesn’t necessarily resolve the hurt within me. This is when love hurts.
On a deeper spiritual note, I understand that our perceptions of other people and the meaning we assign to the things that happen to us are the greatest obstacles to our healing.
It is never really love that hurts us. It is the lack of love that hurts us. It is the lack of love others may demonstrate towards us. It is the lack of love we feel towards them as a result and it is the lack of love we feel for ourselves.
This idea that love heals all wounds is greatly misunderstood. We may operate from a belief that if we just love the person enough, all the problems in our relationship will magically resolve. But it doesn’t work this way.
The love we are giving to others may very well be conditional love. We are giving in order to get something in return, even if that something is love, approval or acceptance. Conditional love does not heal all wounds. We need to learn how to offer unconditional love, first to ourselves. We need to learn to offer the things we want from others to ourselves. We need to bring love to those wounded places within ourselves.
When we learn to really love ourselves, we can fall back on this self-love when love hurts us. We develop an understanding that nobody “out there” really has the power to hurt us. It’s all happening within us. The more we understand what is going on, on the inside, the greater our power to heal.
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