It’s common for people to fear being alone. Some people feel that all the time and some people just have moments in their life when they can reflect and feel that. Some people experience an ever-present loneliness, others experience loneliness at moments in their life.

 In doing 30 years of therapy I have witnessed thousands of people struggle and devote their whole life based on that one fear. Sometimes it’s conscious fear and sometimes it’s subconscious fear they’re unaware affects their life profoundly. The notion of arriving at a place where one can be alone but still connected with people healthily is an enticing goal. Much can be said on the topic of loneliness, but today I want to talk about a less common subject, which is the idea that most of these people while terrified of being alone, are also fearful of love.

 If you look at it conversely that is the cause of everyone’s loneliness. Now I know this may be tough to digest, because you may have a long list of folks you love. But the truth is few people know what actual love is. 

People base love on the family patterns they were used to, cultural norms, and mostly on what their ego says love is.  Countless songs are written about the quests for love, but nobody knows how to define love. I have sat with thousands of couples and at the end of the day, everybody’s guarding their heart while blaming the other person for the problems in their relationship. But why is the heart guarded? Why is the heart not open to the other person’s problems or difficulties? I am not speaking about abuse between people and I’m not talking about engulfing other people. 

When we are little we have open hearts and are happy to love our parents and hopeful they will love us unconditionally. A lot of parents strive for this but haven’t done too much work on themselves so they don’t exactly know how to love either. There is a base biological love and care that happens with some parents and some parents aren’t equipped to achieve that base level. So when your heart’s open and you’re vulnerable as a child and things don’t go well, there is depression, shaming, busy parents, or any other myriad of things that disconnect the child from the parent, and the child starts shutting the heart down. They turn to their mind to rationalize it or they distract themselves from the concreteness of every day. As a result, the child becomes wounded.

Because everybody’s got some kind of wound or place where they are shut down in their heart ; we all think it’s normal and we all agree to it. Then we have this deep longing for somebody else to fix that and we don’t fix it ourselves. But why don’t we fix it ourselves? And why do we want somebody else to do that but find that nobody ever really can? It is because our deep subconscious fear is afraid to let somebody in and try again, we’re afraid to let somebody hurt us again. This can happen in the best families with the best intentions. Unless you’ve done deep analysis across from someone you are driving blind. You can read every self-help book there is and you will miss your blind spots. 

Learning to open our hearts and share ourselves and feel the deep pain and the deep love around us is quite a task to undertake. It is one of the most important tasks that one should undertake. Most people have a similar problem with having a wall up for an opening in a spiritual avenue due to abuses of different people within religious organizations, the religious or spiritual systems themselves, or the ways that their parents misused that information. People also will project on God or the universe whatever difficulty they had with their parents. 

So how does one let love in? 

There are many avenues and people should choose one that feels comfortable to start with. There is a Buddhist meditation called Tong Lin that is a practice to help people open their hearts. One example is to meditate on somebody that you love very much and feel your heart, then meditate on somebody that you feel benign about, and then meditate on somebody that you might feel hatred towards. You can open your heart by simply thinking of other people and finding ways to help other people. The most important aspect of healing this would be to go deeper into your childhood wounds where everything got stored in a specific way in the beginning.

An infant know’s by six months old if they’re going to be taken care of or not and they can’t even speak at that point. We have to go back in and feel the pain with the help of somebody who knows how to navigate that. Meditation and somatic psychology are better tools to help you go deep inside yourself. Your mind may think it’s safe but your body may still not open until it’s addressed. As you heal the deeper parts then you have the opportunity to heal your current relationships and your ways of responding to them. “Man knows thyself” is a very real thing. If you know what you’re feeling, how you got here, and what’s happening inside of you you won’t feel so afraid of opening your heart again. If you know how to feel deep pain you won’t hide your heart and you’ll be able to feel love. If you understand yourself you will not continue choosing partners or people who don’t know how to love and then wonder why you never get what you need. The most important thing to know is that unless you love yourself and know yourself deeply you will not be ready to let love in. So stop looking outside of you for what somebody across from you is doing wrong and be courageous and go deeper.