Love can be passionate and romantic, throwing you off balance in delightful ways. It can be soft and subtle, welcoming as a balmy summer evening. The shared intimacies, humor, and kindnesses can become touchstones in times of disruption: a salve after a day spent wrestling obligations or a couple of years of a pandemic. Indeed, it can be all of these things mixed and mingled. But unless we come to understand and address defensive tendencies that come from a lifetime of being let down, this precious experience can wither.
Want love but always mess it up?
Have you ever had the experience of anxiety and panic when someone you really like seems to like you back and showers you with affection, or maybe gives you a look that makes you check behind you to see who else might be nearby? Certainly, a part of you thinks, you’re not worthy of that kind of sweetness! And so you say something weird or nasty or off-putting or awkward and the moment is gone. You’re left wondering what’s wrong with you. Why did you mess things up again?
In “He Cared About Me, So I Broke Up With Him,” a recent essay featured in the New York Times’ Modern Love series, author Jessica Slice described her reaction to being with someone she truly cared for as being really hard to take. She writes, “… when faced with the potential for a healthy relationship, my body and mind panicked… instead of feeling comforted by a loyal partnership, I felt disgusted and afraid. Until that point, my closest relationships had been marked by uncertainty and loss, and they felt, perversely, safe.”
It’s almost as if the way we are used to being “loved”, which may be better described as being rejected or mistreated, is more comfortable and more tolerable than the real thing. When we are faced with a real opportunity for closeness with a person who treats us really well, the strange feeling of being genuinely cared for might be too much to handle. So we say “No thanks!”
Embracing love through self-understanding
Thankfully, there are ways to work through our pasts and learn to let love in. In his recently released book, Challenging the Fantasy Bond, Dr. Robert W. Firestone writes, “On an unconscious level, we may sense that if we did not push love away, the whole world as we have experienced it would be shattered and we would not know who we are.” In other words, we might unconsciously sabotage our own efforts at finding and maintaining a loving relationship in order to maintain an outdated sense of self.
Frequently, the feeling of being in love gets in the way of acting from love. The feeling may be comfortable and satisfying — until evidence of the discrepancy starts to seep through; real exchanges between you and your partner that may make you feel a little too vulnerable; kindnesses directed toward you that you may ward off or view with disdain; moments of intimacy that may leave you feeling out of sorts instead of close. When this happens, the tendency is to bolt, literally or figuratively — finding reasons to end the relationship or ways to diminish the frequency of those tender times that bring you up short.
Dr. Robert W. Firestone explains, “… many find it difficult to tolerate the kind of life they say they want, because expanding their boundaries and finding love or warmth revive the pain and emptiness of past hurts… in numbing themselves to these negative emotions, they block out positive emotions as well.”
He is optimistic, however. He suggests that coming to understand the defenses we use to ward off love enables us to retain our genuine feelings of closeness and affection for one another. As an example, Dr. Firestone says that when we learn to share with our partners our feelings about the existential realities inherent in the human condition, we are more likely to approach each other with a sense of understanding and empathy. Embracing life fully with minimal defenses enables us to remain open and vulnerable to the people we love.
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To explore this topic further, we invite you to join Dr. Lisa Firestone for a free webinar on PsychAlive.org entitled “Challenging the Fantasy Bond,” on February 23rd from 11am-12:30pm PST.
