Scared of love? 5 reframes to help…
Hands up if you know that you have a fear of love and you suspect that your fear is contributing to a block stopping you from having the love life you really want to have….. The fear of love keeps a lot of us stuck in our relationships or lack of relationships.
When we wanted to have children, my husband Yasu and I went through a fertility journey, because it did not happen for us straight away. It didn’t even happen for us after a long while.
The fear of loving someone as much as a mother would, and the potential of losing them, was so massive that it was a big part of the reason that it was harder for us to conceive when we wanted to. I did a lot of inner work, releasing and reflecting to be able to both let go of some of that fear, and to open to the vulnerability of loving so deeply - because ultimately, loving deeply does open us up to loss. Do we really want to allow that potential, one day inevitability of loss to stop us from loving, and living for that matter? As the mama of a teen and an almost teen, I am feeling that loss even now – all the little things I no longer need to do for my children make my heart ache, in some small way even as I enjoy the freedom!
Today, on the 31st of October here in the southern hemisphere, we really need to be doing a spring festival – but because our festivals come from Europe, we are currently celebrating Halloween. Halloween was traditionally an autumn festival, called Samhain. Check out this source for more info on the origins – I find it so interesting as I think we’d deal with the ultimate loss, death, if we really knew and practiced the roots of Halloween and Samhain. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Where-did-Halloween-come-from
Samhain, which was eventually called Halloween, was the day where the veil between the living and the dead was thinner, so we could communicate more freely with ancestors and loved ones that had passed. Why am I talking about Halloween in a blog all about attracting the love of your life? It’s connected because how we deal with death is intrinsically tied to these fears we have around love - this effects how we attract love into our lives!
Our difficulties in dealing with death properly points to something much deeper, our difficulties in dealing with life properly. What is the most important thing in life? I think that once we have our basic physical needs met, it’s love.
Perhaps you’re afraid of losing people - what is more hard in some ways than loving? Losing those we love. And if they say the only two certain things are death and taxes, then we know we will lose people one day.
There are few steps that we can all take to help us deal with our feelings around death and dying which will then in turn help us show up for love. As you read through these 5 reframes, tune into how this shows up for you – especially when it comes to meeting new people and opening up your heart again.
1. If you are avoiding love at all cost, know that our brains are trying to keep us safe because of this fear of love, and the unknown! We can deal with feelings of unresolved hurts to help with this. Most of us have experienced loss, pain and disappointment in love before – and it was so very painful. Considering this, imagine how our energy field is interacting with the world currently – we might be unintentionally pushing love away because we just don’t want to deal with all that pain again. I recommend diving deeply into our inner work to help you to stop sabotaging and avoiding love. Check out this blog about ‘The Shadow Valley’, it may help: https://www.welcomelastinglove.com/blog/enter-the-shadow-valley
Reframe: The more potent inner work I do, the stronger and more free around love I feel, making love an interesting adventure rather than something to be avoided out of fear.
2. Fear can stop us from leaning into love as we can be afraid of being vulnerable. To help with this, do some reflection and self-knowledge work around vulnerability. Here are some journaling prompts to get you started. How do you act when you’re feeling vulnerable? Is vulnerability scary, if not terrifying, for you? Why is that? What happened in the past to have you feeling like this? Write it down, clear it out - don’t let any stone remain unturned when it comes to this piece.
Reframe: Real relating does involve opening your heart, and so that also involves being vulnerable with yourself and others. How exciting that you can start practicing now with these journal prompts!
3. The struggles we have in dealing with death in the west gets heightened for me at Halloween. It reminds me of issues we have with disappointment, ‘failure’ and loss.
When you’ve had people pass away, how do you honour their passing? How do you honour their lives? Are you a chasing eternal youth and at some subconscious level, acting as if death will not happen? Have you ever looked into what different cultures do to honour death? They honour the person when they leave the physical plane. In some places – for example in Japan, they place out food and water for the person who has passed away to help their spirit transition to a new place. In some countries, they have an honouring for example the ‘day of the dead’.
We could also use celebrations like Halloween to instil a shift in our culture around honouring our ancestors – those that have come before and the loved ones that we have lost along the way. In Australian Aboriginal culture and in many other indigenous people’s stories and values there is a lot of honouring of ancestors. Perhaps in dealing with death in a more conscious way where we openly talk about people’s lives and deaths, that will help us deal with other challenges in life, such as loss or disappointment.
Reframe: Death is truly a part of life. Halloween is about remembering my ancestors and who has gone before, so I choose to honour them in whatever way feels fit for me. This in turn helps me deal with other challenges in life.
4. Halloween and dressing up as the scarier or shadow sides of life reminds me about the essential, but sometimes hard, choice to tap into the unseen the shadow aspects of self. What shadow aspects of ourselves do we have under lock and key? How can we acknowledge our patterns of thought or behaviour that are not helpful to us?
Our task in attracting love is not as one client put it to me once to “attract someone without any baggage” – that would be impossible. If we had no baggage I think we may transcend into another dimension or something – we would no longer need a human body to live in and experience this beautiful classroom that is Earth! We can help each other by learning how to express our feelings, express our needs and wants with care for the other person – and find someone who’s brand of weird complements our own. If we want to significantly change someone from the get go, it will be very hard to live in loving relationship with them. Have you ever tried to change any human apart from yourself? It doesn’t really work of course, because we need to want to change ourselves, internally, before we can change!
Reframe: It’s ok to have shadow parts of myself, and my future partner will have them, too. Our task here is to help you attract someone who you can live in joy and love with, and who’s patterns, toxicity and shadow selves we can work with. Because we all have these tricky aspects of ourselves. Any idea of perfection doesn’t exist. Let’s embrace our shadows while choosing to live in the light!
5. Fear is often about disconnection. In the modern world, we need to return to connection with ourselves, with each other and with nature. They say the absence of fear is love so how can we cultivate connection and love in all of these areas of life. Choose to try something, start there.
Reframe:Connecting to myself, others and nature as much as I can helps me release any fears about love!
In the comments below please let me know one way you want to clear any fear of Love so you can level up your love life. I am so curious to hear what you have to say!
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I can’t wait to see your love light shine as you step into Love!