Getting love

Some good thoughts from Melody Beattie that I wanted to share with you this morning…

I know. We didn’t get loved the way we wanted. Some of us have spent years picking through the messy issues of parents who had unusual ways of showing love or who didn’t show love at all.

We may have had spouses who were dreadful at showing love. Issues like alcoholism and other dysfunc­tions can genuinely interfere with a person’s ability to love. Some of us took that personally.We looked around and the only conclusion we could come up with is that we weren’t lovable.

Some of us need to grieve the absence of love in our family of origin. We may have missed an important emo­tional lesson while growing up, and we barely realize it. That lesson is understanding how lovable we are.

Some of us learned to protect ourselves by caring for others, while refusing to let love into our own lives. We found that it is easier to shut down and not be open to love, rather than be denied love.

After a while, we stop seeing the love that is there for us. We refuse the small gestures that may mean a tremen­dous amount to the person offering them. These gestures include words of concern, support, understanding, assis­tance, kindness, or a genuine expression of like or love. If we don’t believe we’re lovable, if we’re not open to seeing and receiving love, we’re going to miss more than just the love we missed in our childhood. We’re going to miss the love that is available for us now.

Challenge: The hardest part about letting people give us love can be softening that tough shell enough to let the gentle words and acts of love sink in.

Source: February 24 | Language of Letting Go

I have found, too, that expectations can be a problem for me. If I’m expecting more, sometimes I miss what is there. Remember the words of the great philosophers The Rolling Stones “You can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes you just might find you get what you need.”