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  Real love.

  Have you ever experienced real, genuine, unrestrained, unconditional love? Perhaps you have not experienced this from someone else. It’s ok if you haven’t. It doesn’t matter if you haven’t. Love comes from within.

  Stay with me.

  I love you.

  That’s right.

  I love you.

  Me, the author of this book. I am expressing love for you, the reader. I have no knowledge of who you are, where you come from or what kind of person you are. It’s irrelevant.

  I choose to express love. It’s my choice.

  Expressing love is like lighting a candle from another candle. It takes absolutely nothing away from a candle to light another candle. It takes nothing away from me, the writer, to express love to you, the reader. I don’t have to know who you are to express love.

  I love you because I choose to.

  Love is absolutely that simple. We have been groomed to withhold love because we have been told it’s scary to love someone who may not love you back.

  You don’t have to expect anything to love someone.

  You don’t have to receive love in order to give it to someone else.

  When we express love for others we grow love in abundance for ourselves.

  The other day I was driving home from work and a driver cut in front of me causing me to slam on my brakes. In the past, (I’ll be honest it hasn’t been that long ago, but I’m growing too) this situation would have caused me to release a stream of expletives. However, once I got my heart rate down, I expressed love for that driver. I honestly didn’t feel it at first, but I reiterated the sentiment. “I love you.” My response to this situation evolved from a sympathetic nervous response (fight, flight or freeze) to a para-sympathetic nervous response. (recovery/feed/breed/calm), “I love you,” I repeated until I was completely calm.

  When we express love for other people, there is no room for hostility. Love wins when we let it. When we express love, we must take note that we are allowing ourselves to be vulnerable to our own willingness to connect. You see, that’s the fear we have. We fear that we aren’t loveable. We fear that others will see the brokenness that we feel inside ourselves and we are scared that if we express love that the love will not be returned. The important thing to remember here is that it doesn’t matter if the love is not returned. You are not broken. You do not have to receive love to give love. Love is boundless and resides limitlessly within all of us. Just because you may not have experienced receiving real, authentic, genuine love from someone doesn’t mean that you cannot express real, authentic, and genuine love for someone.

  You are influential beyond measure. Your only limit is what you believe. Most of us have been programmed to believe that we must restrict our expression of love as a measure of being authentic in a relationship. Can you imagine going on a date with someone and having them say “I love you” before the main course at dinner arrives? That’s a terrifying prospect. It carries so much weight to it because we have been programmed to believe that. Looking at this situation logically there are two possibilities: One, this person that you’re on a date with is a genuine, loving and kind person who believes that love is a boundless commodity and treats everyone they meet with an act of genuine loving kindness. When this person says “I love you,” they mean it with every fiber of their being. The only difference is that going on the date is an interview for a potential partnership based in a loving connection. Or, two, this person is socially inept and doesn’t understand the social contracts surrounding the expression of love too early in the courting experience. The sad part is that the person who doesn’t understand social dynamics likely doesn’t have a full appreciation of the expression of love and is only making this expression out of some sense of obligatory engagement to secure a partner. The latter, of course, is something that should be alarming to most people, but being lonely will cause us to make excuses for other people’s behavior. I’ve been there a few times, myself.

  Why is it so scary to express love?

  Who do you love?

  When you are angry or upset with someone you love, do you feel a hesitation in expression of love for them?

  Do you use love and validation as a reward in relationships when the other party participates in the relationship to your liking?

  How do you express love for someone?

  How has love been expressed to you?

  Cultural influences and social norms have created a template that we blindly follow with regards to how we express love. It unnecessarily causes grief and pain for individuals who desperately want to receive love. Perhaps we are fearful that we would inadvertently create an unwelcome attachment from someone who misinterprets our expression. You don’t have to want to spend your life in a partnership with someone in order to express love for that person. Unfortunately, many people may be confused with the expression of love as meaning that they are the ONLY person that you love.

  Expressing love for others can be achieved beyond words. You don’t necessarily have to say the words “I love you” to express love. In fact, it’s preferable to demonstrate loving acts towards and for other people instead of making a culturally implicating statement such as “I love you.”

  Individuals caught up in dysfunctional relationships will often ignore red flags, such as gaslighting and controlling behavior in others, simply because the other party will state “I love you,” even though they never make attempts to demonstrate love through authentic means.

  Real love is never restrained. It is never withheld. It is always upfront and authentic. If you can be truly honest with yourself, you know when love is genuine and when it isn’t.

  Do you love yourself?

  Do you want to love yourself?

  Do you deserve love?

  Do others deserve to be loved by you?

  Love is the one resource that lives in abundance within all of us, but is the one commodity we find the hardest to tap into. You have infinite love resources. You have the capacity to love deeply and without reservation. When you are ready and when you choose, you can express love that is immeasurable. You can express love for yourself, your family, your friends, your enemies etc. You can break free of cultural restrictions. You have the right and the ability to express your love the way you choose to do so.

  Do you know how to love others?

  Does loving someone scare you?

  For folks like me, people raised in fear-based thinking patterns, the expression of love is sometimes the only thing that we have control over. So, if you can imagine a child in an abusive environment feeling completely out of control, being able to decide on when to express love is the only conduit of feeling some sense of influence in an environment of tyranny. When a child is raised like this, it feels impossible to be vulnerable to our own capacity for loving others. It’s terrifying, in fact, to think that we could express love for someone else when all we know is that it would be used against us or would be considered a form of weakness. When a child is terrorized by the very people that are expected to express unconditional love, then it’s only natural to expect the child to distrust any connection with someone who professes love. For me, it was reiterated many times in future relationships that I was “loveable”. Logically, now, I can assert the dynamics of these relationships as having ended for a variety of reasons, none of which had anything to do with my worthiness of self or being a lovable person. Of course, at the time I didn’t know this, and these experiences only served to reinforce my belief of not being loveable or of not deserving love.

  I love me.

  I love who I am. I love my growth as a person. I love everything about me including my flaws. They make me who I am. I love the work I do both in my personal life and in my professional life.

  It is in this discovery of my own love of self where I have identified my worth. I know what I am worth and, as
a result, I have a keen understanding of what I deserve in my relationships with others. I understand and identify fear-based thinking and when I encounter that in others, particularly when it’s negatively projected towards me, I simply send it away in love. I hold space for my worth and my growth. While unfortunate for others, sometimes those individuals are at a different place in life and project their own dysfunction. It’s ok when this happens. You must simply enforce boundaries, recognize the behavior, express your own refusal to tolerate it and return to sender. You do all this with love, both for the other person as well as for yourself.

  It’s not a perfect process by any measure. We are all human beings and fallible by nature. It pisses us off when we express love for someone and then it’s mishandled or misused. No one wants that. No one wants to express love for someone and then have that love manipulated. It’s part of life.

  Do you love someone who refuses to accept your love?

  Do you carry a torch for someone who refuses to give you time? Should you still love that person?

  I say “Yes” and here’s why. If you express love for someone that is not returned or is not accepted, remember what your reason is for expression of love in the first place. You express love just because. There’s no quid pro quo when it comes to love, it just is. If your heart hurts because you love someone who doesn’t accept your love or doesn’t return it, then you’ve got to take some time to figure out why you’re allowing this pain to begin with.

  I had the biggest crush on this guy in high school and for a short while after. We never really “dated,” but I loved him deeply. He was my first and I thought that I wanted to spend my life with him at the time. Looking back, he never gave me any indication that he felt remotely the same toward me. He never agreed to be my boyfriend. I was the aggressor and willingly volunteered my virginity to him. He was funny and kind. He wasn’t a mean person at all. We had a great time when we worked together at the fast food restaurant. I poured all the love I had into creating something with him that simply never happened. I got hurt because I hurt myself. I loved him and thought that if I loved him hard enough, he would love me back. It didn’t happen and for many years I was resentful towards him, even though I acted friendly. He never made any promises to me and, as the years went on, I realized that it was just my own child-like adoration of someone who made me laugh. Because I never witnessed a healthy relationship, I had no foundation of what to expect. When he went out of his way to make me laugh, I must have assumed that he liked me. I’m sure he felt some form of validation in making me laugh. It felt good to be around him because of this and I mistook that for a perceived romantic interest on his part. Maybe he was interested at one point, but due to my willingness to have sex with him, was a bit overwhelming for him? I don’t know. I just remember t I thought loving him as hard as I could would result in my feeling loved back. That didn’t happen.

  I did not love myself back then.

  I did not have the ability to understand how to love, respect, and hold a space of worthiness for myself just because I had no idea that I should do so. Even though, in my teenage years, my homelife improved greatly, (I began defending myself against the physical assaults and as a result they stopped, though they manifested as increased emotional abuse.), I was still sort of floating about in the aftermath. I was clueless on how relationships worked and had no idea about what it meant to have self-respect or a sense of wellness. It was like I had been blown off a sinking ship. The ship was gone below the seas, but I was still floating about in the refuse and debris of the past. I was merely surviving. I didn’t know what else to do or if there was anything else to do.

  I smile when I think back now on that love-starved, 17-year-old with the knock-knees and the freckles. I can see her now with her brunette hair teased and sprayed with her work visor neatly perched in the nest of 90s mall hair. I see her giggle when her friends come through the drive thru and cut up on those hot Alabama summer nights. She’s adorable with her uniform sprayed with oil and salt from the fry machine. On the inside, she’s an angry, hurt, and sensitive mess, but on the outside, she’s a beautiful, funny, smart, intuitive and creative young woman who has absolutely no idea what phenomenal things lie in wait in her future.

  I love her. I love me.

  Can you imagine yourself this way?

  Can you step outside of yourself and see yourself with the kindness, beauty and love that you deserve?

  Describe yourself through this lens.

  Who do you dare to love?

  Chapter Thirteen

  Honesty

  Remember, the purpose is not to find judgment or blame, but to find reasons for the dysfunctional logic that causes us to make poor decisions.

  When was the last time you told a lie?

  Perhaps you don’t remember. Perhaps you don’t remember the last time you willingly sacrificed the truth for a more palatable, albeit false, scenario. It’s OK if this topic makes you a little bit uncomfortable. The discomfort you feel is the result of having a consciousness that desires equanimity, fairness, and a life of authenticity. If you are someone who uses deception and manipulation to function in your day-to-day activities and you do not feel any sense of discomfort then that could be the result of many different reasons. If you choose to continue reading, I think that is enough demonstration of willful honest intent for making positive change.

  Perhaps you are someone who survives through the creation of your own reality. I have to say, there is something commendable about a person who is resourceful to the point of creating a fantasy as a bridge to survive this life. Unfortunately, what happens when we create a fallacy or a story is we become aligned with that creation in a way that places us in a situation where we must continually make a choice to either continue the fantasy or to admit that it was the creation of our imagination. Our ego does not like to be wrong. If we create a story of fantasy and then perpetuate that narrative as though it is authentic and real, we become slaves to the fantasy, that is until we are aware enough of self to take a step forward into reality and to learn how to wholly accept the truth of our decisions.

  Is there an aspect of your life you have perpetuated as the truth when, in actuality, it was a creation that you sold as a measure to make yourself feel more acceptable or lovable to others?

  Instead of holding safe boundaries for yourself when people press you for intimate details about your life, do you give them a falsehood as opposed to confronting them about the inappropriate nature of their intrusion? For example: “I heard you were engaged again. That’s nice. How many times have you been married by the way?” Would you answer truthfully and then feel embarrassed or ashamed if you have not been comfortable giving that information? Would you tell that person “I’m not sure what the number of my previous marriages has to do with my engagement but thank you for congratulating me. I’ll be sure to pass on your sentiments to my fiancé.” Maybe you might go the more direct route with a comment such as “My previous marriages are in the past and certainly none of your business.”, or would you avoid the question altogether or lie about the answer?

  The purpose of this chapter is not necessarily to identify where you are lying to other people. It is, however, an opportunity to identify how we relate to other people with regards to how we see ourselves. If we are uncomfortable with certain dynamics about our lives, we may not feel comfortable sharing those details with other people. Additionally, we may feel intimidated when other people express an interest in our lives and want to impress people by giving details that are inaccurate or deliberately incorrect.

  We certainly do not owe all the intimate details of our personal lives and our personal narrative to other people, especially when it makes us uncomfortable sharing these details. The problems come from feeling as though we are not worthy to enforce boundaries. Sometimes, it just feels better to be deceptive with others rather than expose our authentic selves.

 
If you have issues, stories, situations, that are a part of your authentic history in narrative that you are not comfortable sharing with other people, then you do not have to share those details. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with enforcing boundaries regarding information about your past traumas, embarrassing situations, etc.

  It is important to understand how lies can erode our sense of well-being. Not all lies are harmful. If we meet someone on the street and ask for directions and comment that the city that we are currently lost in is “the most beautiful place we’ve ever been,” it is not typically a harmful deception. It is important to understand the difference between what is harmful and what is not.

  The buildup.

  When we create a narrative that is inaccurate or inauthentic, we create a foundation that we must build upon. Whether that is commentary shared at a family reunion about a promotion at work or how well a child is doing in school; perhaps an utterance made during a lunch break at work about buying a new home or gossiping about a fellow coworker etc. These lies become just like living breathing organisms that you must consistently feed with more lies.