The biggest misunderstanding about self is thinking you need an external force to show and tell you how you should be loved whilst also loving you in a way that makes you feel loved.
I have never met anyone who wakes up in the morning and thinks “Hmmm… I can’t wait to experience the many ways I will feel unloved today.” We are born for love, to feel loved and appreciated and to give love. Whether you are Christian, Muslim, Buddhist or even agnostic, there’s one principle that is true: Energy can neither be created nor destroyed. You cannot stop the flow of love.
So, where does love go when we don’t feel it?
FREQUENCIES
Now what happens when you give off the right frequencies but do not feel seen or heard – you end up not feeling loved over time.
Some of us may have carried resentment packaged as love for so long, we don’t quite know what love feels like but we’ve heard of it. Yes, sometimes this is the reality. In order to know it is hot, you need to feel the heat right? Simply being told it’s hot does not all of a sudden make you hot – no matter how detailed one may describe the heat.
You need to feel loved, understand what love is and communicate the ways you would like to feel it. You may ask me how, I have my own method that therapy assisted me to get to. I am a terrible wordsmith but what I learnt how to do is string words together that help me communicate, get the facts and separate the feelings.
Allow me to make an example for you: When my husband and I were dating, I had huge doubts about my abilities to give love. I really loved my now husband but the feeling (doubt and inadequacy) were overwhelming. So what did I do? Whilst he was away on holiday with his family back home, because he couldn’t call me like he does on the regular, I started doubting we were together. I thought he’d seen the inadequacy too and we had effectively broken up. YIKES! When he returned I was so surprised… and him… disappointed – I had made the deadly mistake of confusing facts and feelings. I didn’t ask. I didn’t dig deeper. Imagine if I’d decided to go with my other side niggas during this period. I joke! LOL
…there’s another flipside to this. It is called unmet needs.
UNMET NEEDS
As you close out your day today, think about a moment today, or in the past week, where you didn’t feel loved. How sad did it make you feel? Write this down – the moment and the feeling.
Then think about a moment you felt utter joy and love. It made you happy right? Write this down – the moment and the feeling.
Isn’t it strange how both of these moments just took you on a journey of the peak and through of your feelings. Sadness and then joy. Is it not crazy how easily our emotions can be manipulated by our feelings and our met or unmet needs?
So here’s a practise I learnt very recently – every time a situation is sad or disappointing, take a piece of paper and draw two columns.
Column 1 – Write down what you would’ve preferred happen and preferred outcome of the situation.
Column 2 – Write down what actually happened and what the outcome is.
I found (and still find) myself in many instances so caught up in the actual way in which the next person was showing up in my life and what their process was and is versus the outcome which I always found was the desired outcome. And this has everything to do with the unmet needs we have.
Unmet needs need therapy. When you identify these patterns in your life, please do get help. You end up pushing people away and putting up walls for people that genuinely love you… and then there you go, you are in someone’s cycle of them not feeling loved.
Do you know what you need to feel loved?
Reflect on this and journal away.
Extract from the last #ArtofBalance Newsletter
For a long while I sought therapy thinking I had to learn tools on how to manage the people around me and fix them in order to heal and move forward in life.
I thought I needed help in making sure I find the right words to say to others “you, and you and you need to change” and I was sooooo wrong.
I had inward work to do. I had to decline and accept certain things. I had to do my own decluttering. I love it when Marie Kondo says we must clear out what doesn’t spark joy for you. Not what doesn’t spark joy in the world. YOU.
We sometimes look at what we have and say, what would others think if I let go of this and didn’t have it… Sound familiar?
I did a 21 days of abundance journey with a group of women via Whatsapp earlier this year and what I can tell you is that cleaning out and changing habits starts inward. Sounds cliche right? But here’s what happens when you don’t internalise this statement:
You start feeling like the manual labour you are making in actual cleaning up and tidying up is in vain (literally and figuratively). Because as you clean you are looking for ways to cover the open space or even justify it with “as I clear, God will give me” or the famous one “full hands don’t receive” – don’t get me wrong, these are quotes I believe in too… but receiving shouldn’t be the terms we place onto our clearing out.
In week 3 of Art of Balance we spoke about partnering right – the same applies for renewal. You can’t just clean out people and things because you have no use for them.
This is a journey that is constantly evolving and needing us to do a lot of inward work too.
You cannot try break bad habits by applying bad habits… there’s a method.
Inward work!
This was very helpful to me. I build very high walls around me for my own sanity only to find that’s when my anxiety kicks in. Thank you for this!
This was really helpful for me things I never realized especially the cleaning inward situation. Thank you ❤️
Enjoyed reading this.