Why love is scary : David Richo

Unconditional love is the very best builder of the immune system. The natural instinct of the body is to want to take love in and to experience the joy and harmony that comes from it. If someone does not let it in, he is having to put out effort to interrupt an instinct towards health and happiness.

But love also comes at you as a will and an intention focused on you with an unconditional desire for you and an unconditional affirmation of your loveability. In other words, it is just what you always wanted but it has a force that can be taxing. You need the capacity to receive it safely. This happens when we are loved safely and securely in early life. This is the mirroring we have referred to earlier .. and now can define more fully : the unconditional positive regard for your feelings and freedom by attention, affection, acceptance, and allowing. Mirroring by a parent equips you to receive love from another adult. If that mirroring did not happen, then you may fear love and have to learn how to receive it in adult life.

Love can scare us because we are required to be vulnerable in order to let it into our lives. Vulnerability has become associated with the frightening prospect of abandonment, an isolation for which there might be no returning This may be the core fear of our unique life story, and all our inhibitions, defences, flights, and mistakes in relationships may harken back ot this one psychological ancestor. This fear hurts and interrupts us because it was never mirrored. No one ever gave us permission to feel such a fear safely. Instead, it was associated with shame and inadequacy. Our work is to mirror that fear in ourselves, to grant it hospitality by showing it attention, acceptance, and affection and allowing it to have its full career. Then and only then does it comfortabley breathe its last. (A clue to our core fear is this : It will be the fearsof how we first felt truly loved. If we felt love when some one stayed with us, then our fear is usually the oppositve of some one going away, i.e., abandoning us.

When we run from love, we are inviting F.E.A.R. to last : Fleeing The Experience of Authentic Reality. The alternative is to let others love us in their awkward, but touching ways. Such defencelessness in us shifts us to resourcefulness. We begin to ASK for the love we want. We can then face love’s challenges with a coherent sense of ourselves and trust that letting love in will not fragment us but enrich our wholeness. When we risk being loved by others and tell them how it workd best for us, we become nurturant to ourselves.

There are other reasons why love may be scary. Since it wants nothing from you, it gives you no excuse to play your game of “I’m afraid I might lose something if I allow this.” It keeps giving so you have to be theone to reject it. “I will keep on loving you : you have to be the one to stop it.” It nourishes as it comes towards you, so it takes away your complaint about being deprived. Now I can no longer play the game of “poor me”. Love is filling me; it is nourishing me. I have no excuses left; love takes them all away. I have to adopt an abundance, rather than a deficiency model.

David Richo

When Love Meets Fear