What do you feel when reading this title?
If you feel curious and you may even feel some pain or sadness, I understand you. This is how I felt a few years ago when the book of Robin Norwood: "Women Who Love Too Much". He talks about women, but I don't think it's a matter of gender, nor of age, it just happens, we suffer when we love too much.
When being in love means suffering, it is that we are loving too much. When this person occupies your thoughts most of the time, it is that we are loving too much. When our goal is that he or she wants to be with us, it is that we are loving too much. When we feel that he or she controls our emotions and much of our behavior, we are loving too much. When we understand that this behavior has a negative influence on our health and well-being, but we have a hard time getting rid of it, we are loving too much.
If you have felt identified so far, I want to help you or inspire you with my own lived experience. I drastically summarize the solution: learn to love yourself.
I know it's painful to hear this drastic statement, in fact, I read it and I feel like crying because of the vivid memories. Because you know what? I thought I loved myself enough until I learned what it was like to really love yourself.
When we love too much we live in an unreal world, fantasy, where the man or woman who makes us unhappy or makes us feel great dissatisfaction is transformed into what we are sure they can become with our help.
I fell in love with an unreality, I thought I fell in love with the person, but I really fell in love with the idea that they loved me, that they loved me as a woman. What's more, it wasn't really love but fear, fear of being alone, fear of not being worthy, of not inspiring affection, fear of being ignored, abandoned. I was definitely in need of affection and acceptance, but of myself.
This article is probably one of the most difficult for me to write, and in fact I think that in some way I am breaking a shell in myself (my heart is racing as I write) to be able to really accept what happened to me; that I was not as strong as I thought, that I was not as optimistic as I thought, that I was not as superwoman as I wanted to think.
I had to experience a major personal crisis to realize that I had to do something with my life, I needed to feel that I could change the course of my life, because the way I was going I was not happy.
How curious, I have gone from sadness and pain (I would even say fear) while writing to gratitude, since right now I was going to write: Thanks to that personal crisis, now I know what it is to love myself.
So if you're in one of those personal crises, I'd say smile, because it is thanks to this personal crisis that you are experiencing that you have the opportunity to learn to love yourself and to look back one day giving meaning to what happened, even thanking what happened. Maybe one day you will even feel like writing an article to give back to the world the learning you have carried out to help other people 🙂
Unfortunately, they taught us to recognize, accept and manage our emotions, they did not teach us to have effective family communication recognizing and accepting the emotions of others, quite the contrary, education was based on hiding emotions, it was not well seen cry, or show sadness, etc. In a large part of the families, the place of trust was not generated to be able to express our feelings.
Most of us have learned not to express our own perceptions or feelings, in some way we have learned to "deny" or "hide" reality, and this greatly deteriorates our way of seeing and facing life in a full and satisfactory.
The reasons why we love too much are several (I encourage you to read the book that I indicated at the beginning) although there is a very significant base: how we have lived our childhood, how we have lived our childhood in the family system or with our caregivers.
In my case, my father (not my father) did not come into my life until I was 12 years old and unfortunately life took him three years ago. Thank you dad for coming into my life, for being the best husband for my mother and the best father for my sister and me. Uff what nostalgia, now with tears in my eyes I keep writing, I know it's time.
Over the years and the experience of personal growth I was able to understand that the lack of support from my father until I was 12 years old, and other circumstances I experienced, led me to the need to focus on men who were difficult to reach emotionally.
I felt that if this emotionally difficult man finally came to love me, then I was worth it. The kind, stable and reliable men who cared about me were not enough to cover my need to feel worthwhile. I was actually unconsciously using this strategy to avoid my pain, my fear.
The emotional crisis led me to let go of my fears in order to move forward, the fear of being alone, the fear of not being loved or recognized, and, paradoxes of life, feeling the fear allowed me to accept it, to discover myself. Discovering myself has undoubtedly led me to love myself, rather, to know how to love myself.
Knowing how to love myself means knowing myself, knowing who I am and who I want to be, discovering what makes me unique, as unique beings that we all are. what are my talents, those that developing them I feel satisfaction, knowing what my values are, those that keeping in mind in my life I feel in coherence with myself, learn to recognize my emotions, accept them and extract useful and functional information from them, Even from my own fears. All of this helps me make the best decisions to carry out actions that fill me with satisfaction.
And of course knowing how to love myself has led me to know how I want to be loved, and that has helped me to know how to choose the partner, which this time, and it is the first time that I say it publicly, I know it is the couple. Thank you Ferre for being in my life; Thank you for reading.
I hope and wish that I have been able to contribute even a grain of reflection in you so that you can face this situation, it is not easy, it is a long road, but visualize the reward, it is there: knowing how to love yourself.
