Oh the agony of unrequited love. After 20 years of commitment in a cold soulless relationship I now have the freedom to pursue real love again.
However dating someone I find genuinely attractive triggers such powerful feelings of desire and unworthiness. Oh the irony!
Getting so close to what you have longed for and then it becomes unavailable — because of course you have to “love yourself first”!
But this “love yourself first” philosophy pisses me off. Arguably it seems more elusive to discover than the soul mate I have spent my life searching for!
Don’t get me wrong — I look after myself, fuel my body well, forgive myself, stand up for myself, work on self development, I have developed a kinder inner voice (as oppose to the inner critic) and I endeavour to pursue my dreams. But a deep, profound and authentic love for myself feels out of reach. Trying to find within what has always been absent just feels a tall order. Or rather impossible. The lonely ache and shame of emptiness and longing….
And maybe that search for a soul mate is really searching for the love of the mother who wasn’t able to give what was so needed.
Is that what is comes down to?
The self love philosophy does make a lot of sense. But how can you repair or fill in the gaps yourself when you never got the parental love you were wired for?
- The loving gaze from caring eyes.
- Acceptance and emotional safety for your whole crazy rainbow of feelings.
- The calming, gentle, regulating, reassuring touch and presence of another human
- Someone delighting in you just being you
Fast forward to the adult search for romantic love and it all sounds a bit familiar to me.
Can you really give yourself these things? Does the answer to this search really exist within? The Alchemist’s treasure under the homely tree the whole time?
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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Photo credit: Element5 Digital on Unsplash
