Real love : being loved and loving ourselves unconditionally

Here’s a question for you? Have you ever known real love? Have you ever just felt the total unconditional support of someone who understands you in all weathers, always understands why you react the way you do and loves you anyway?

I feel myself to be blessed to be at least starting to love myself in this way and I have had that love shown to me by someone for quiet a while that for so long I doubted was real. Its sad to say that I could not trust in that love completely until recently, and when I told others about it, they were also cynical and even tried to actively destroy it. I also remember my ex partner saying to me ‘there is no such thing as unconditional love.” That was true for him, he could not show it and never experienced it in his own life..so the reality was true for him, but it was just his reality.

One of my favorite books is a book called Love Without Conditions its written by Paul Ferrini and is close to the work of A Course in Miracles supposedly ‘received’ in meditation by a woman called Helen Schucman from Jesus. One of my favorite sayings of Paul’s is this “all attack is a cry for love.” I think its true, often we attack because we were attacked in all kinds of ways in life. As we grew few of us really knew much unconditional support from family and teacher or peers. Most often, for many of us, belonging was predicated on ‘doing the right thing’ and often our natural inclination was supposedly to ‘do the wrong thing.’ Sure none of us may be totally innocent but as we grow I think a huge part of that involves growing into who we are meant to be, it doesn’t actually mean having to alter our shape to fit which is what happens when we were not loved unconditionally, seen, supported, valued and affirmed as our true selves.. And this state of being is one that does not depend on DOING we have an implicit value simply due to the fact God created us and chose for us to exist.

Now boundaries do exist too, but there is also the realisation that those boundaries are different for all of us, and yes we have the right to set them. To love someone unconditionally may not mean having no boundaries.. manipulation would say ‘If you don’t do such and such you are not loving me unconditionally!’ I do not think that is true. We can honor the person’s need and right to their feelings while not giving them what they feel they want or even may need, because we are human too and part of unconditional love is knowing everyone is different and not a carbon copy of us and had different boundaries, values, reactions and responses.

To know there is a good reason we feel and want and need and react as we do is very important. Try being raised in a home where you are taught the opposite and watch what happens. It is what happens in a lot of narcissistic or emotionally neglectful homes or homes where parents are just too self involved to even see us as we truly are or were so wounded and emotionally ignored or shut down themselves theg lacked that skill or desire. Healing from this in later life involves finding those who get us and let us have these feelings, wants, needs, responses and reactions while validating them. This is unconditional love. And the truth is, if we cannot find it out there, there still is a way to find it within our own hearts and minds.. It may take some time to learn if we were shamed for feelings or needs or reactions in the past because this is what we internalise. Pete Walker’s excellent work on Complex PTSD shows how intrinsic the inner critic and outer critic is to the childhood experience of emotional abandonment. I have an old post on this to reblog after posting this one today.

We can work to change our relationship with the inner critical voice and the outwardly critical one that so often just operates out of fear of ever getting close enough to get hurt again. It may take a long time but I do believe there is such an thing as unconditional love and it starts within, but then, just every so often we also are lucky enough to find it in the real world.. But when we do, what will it take to open our hearts beyond our fear to truly trust again?