Earning Love is Hell; it’s Time for Some Heaven

“Your destiny is not just to find love; it is to be the most loving person you can be.”

Robert Holden, Loveability

As an active codependent (for most of my life), I failed miserably at being the most loving person I can be. And even as a recovering codependent over the past 20 years, I have still failed at understanding and thus knowing how to be a truly loving person. To me love has always been about giving of myself to get something back from others.

Love, as it was modeled for me as a child, was something you earned. It was the great pay-off; like receiving a paycheck for doing a good job at work. I watched my mother earn the love of everyone around her by looking after all of their needs and doing, doing, doing for everyone. She only stopped doing if she didn’t get her paycheck (the love from others she thought she had earned). If someone didn’t love her for all she was doing, then she’d withhold her love (doing) until they showed some sort of remorse and renewed appreciation for her.

Even to this day, this is the very model of “love” that is deeply entrenched inside of me. It’s a very unsatisfying and empty model for love. And yet, I can’t seem to shake it. Through recovery, I have learned to love people simply for who they are, and to do for them because I want to, not because I expect something in return. It’s satisfying to move in that direction, but it hasn’t been enough to stop me from feeling dead inside. I’m afraid that this dead feeling is what J.D. Salinger referred to as “hell” when he said “Hell is the suffering of being unable to love.”

People express love toward me, but I rarely feel it, or allow myself to feel it. I have a deep-seated fear of abandonment and that may be what is keeping me from allowing myself to feel authentic love. It could be the fear that allowing myself to enjoy it would lead to devastating consequences if it were suddenly withdrawn from me. And I learned as a child that it could easily be withdrawn if for some reason it was determined I wasn’t “good enough,” or if I did something that was deemed unforgivable.

So if you are like me, the big question for us is how do we authentically become the most loving persons we can be? Well, I wonder if we first need to have some sort of inner-implosion. Many of us have seen videos of old buildings being blown up from within and reduced to dust and scrap materials that are hauled away for new creation to take place. It may be that for us to become new creations who are able to love authentically, we need to implode all we have learned into dust and scrap to be hauled away by our Higher Power.

We can ask the Spirit of our Higher Power to dismantle and remove all of the self-destructive, codependent thoughts and behaviors we learned about love as children. We can tell our Higher Power that we want a clean slate inside of us, that we want to start freshly anew, and that we want our Higher Power to teach us what REAL love is—especially what it feels like. 

In addition we can practice affirmations that emphasize the fact that we are lovable in and of ourselves, that we are good enough, that everything we have ever done wrong is forgivable and that love is not earned. We can also pray for the Spirit of love to lead us into the natural flow of loving from our hearts, with no expectations and no need for reciprocation. 

As we grow into purely being the most loving persons we can be, we will most likely begin to experience real love in return; a love we will no longer be afraid to experience because we will relish it as long as it is ours instead of fearing the loss of it or abandonment. And we will hopefully be lifted out of the deadness of our “hell” and into the wonderment, the heaven, of authentic love. Let’s give it a try.