We can love ourselves even in the face of unloving interactions

WE

love to give love and we love to feel loved. The feeling of love fills our soul, making us feel whole. It’s for this reason we pursue love in all of our relationships.

Love makes us feel whole because love itself is whole. Of course, there are different types of love, but each has some measure of the qualities of acceptance, acknowledgment, appreciation, and adoration.

However, when someone who criticizes us claims to love us, the sudden fragmentation of pure positive energy crudely breaks the spell. Now, instead of feeling accepted and adored, we feel rejected and disdained. The love is gone and we shiver and shrivel in its icy vacuum.

Where Does Love Go?

As important and central as it is, love is a poorly understood emotion. Some may be surprised to even hear it described as an emotion — a simple feeling. Isn’t love a commodity? Something you can earn, win, or otherwise be given?

Unfortunately, the latter concept of love is at the root of many serious relationship difficulties. A person gets very upset when love is “withheld,” “withdrawn,” or diminished in any way — as if love is something that can fill a hole in our heart. Fragmented and fractured love — the only kind that humans are capable of offering — is often rejected as love altogether. “You don’t love me enough.” “If you really loved me, you wouldn’t act that way.” “Your anger shows me you don’t love me.”

Too bad for us. We can never get perfect love from imperfect people.

The good news, however, is that we don’t need to get love from people at all. Hashem breathes love into us along with the spark of G-dliness He installs into the fabric of our being. We’re connected to Hashem through this love, as well as to ourselves and to the world. Parents don’t give their child love; they show their child where the love resides within the child himself. Repeated smiles and kind words open the door to the child’s heart, showing the child the way into the chamber of love.

Rejection

Once we comprehend that love is a feeling that resides inside of us — something that we own and carry with us at all times — we become less triggered by feelings of hurt when others don’t act lovingly toward us. Now we understand that we haven’t been robbed of anything. We’re whole, wholly loved, loving, and lovable. The unloving person is having a bad day or lacks good communication skills or is upset — maybe triggered — about something. The display of rejecting behaviors (criticism, unpleasant facial expression and/or tone of voice, harsh words and so on) are manifestations of the other person’s feelings. They belong to the other person. This has nothing to do with our goodness, wholeness, lovableness, or anything else — it has to do with the other person’s perceptions, experiences, expressions, and communication.

This is true even if we triggered the other person’s uproar. “I forgot to make a phone call my boss asked me to make. When she found out, she got upset and said something sarcastic. When I was younger, I would have cried all night after that. I’d feel defective and unworthy. Eventually I realized that I still have self-worth even if I make mistakes. Now when someone is nasty to me, I know that this says more about them than it does about me, and I no longer feel devastated. I still feel my self-worth. It’s a very good place to be.”

Once we own our love, we’re free to enjoy it and share it with others. It’s a feeling we can access simply by placing a hand over our heart or by focusing our attention in the area of the heart with the intention to feel love. Or we can breathe it in, and if desired, breathe it out to others. Our love is accessible to us just by thinking about it and sending it to ourselves; our love belongs to us even though we’re flawed.

Reducing our feelings of inadequacy and shame by accessing our own love allows us to grow and improve. Thriving in its security makes us confident enough to thrive in our relationships with others.

(Originally featured in Family First, Issue 848)