Loving someone worthy is the bravest act we can do

For as long as I can remember, I’ve had this deep yearning to be fully seen and cherished for who I am.

I’m sure it’s a feeling you can relate to. 

I believe it’s a basic human need.

The desire to be so fully chosen that you can no longer doubt your own divinity.

The pain of this need was especially poignant when I was in unfulfilling relationships.

People think that loneliness comes from being single, but I can confidently tell you that I’ve never felt lonelier than the times that I’ve been in a relationship where I felt unseen and uncherished.

I would literally beg my partner for more intimacy, and receive performative efforts that quickly died off.

But what if my pleas for intimacy were also somewhat performative? Or at least, misguided.

It took me a long time to learn that I had chosen these emotionally unavailable people because of my own deep-seated fear of intimacy.

What?!!!

How could that be? 

All I’d ever wanted was to be fully seen and accepted. 

And to fully see my partner with love and warmth.

But it turns out that we match with people at our exact level of emotional availability. 

I had learned about this from reading psychology texts. But I couldn’t fully accept or integrate it until I witnessed it in myself.

So, why would I – a person who was literally aching for intimacy – actually have a low threshold for it?

Because I was deeply afraid of rejection.

On some primal level, I had internalized the message that I wasn’t good enough for unconditional love just as I was.

I believed I needed to be perfect in order to avoid rejection.

But intimacy requires us to let someone see all of us: the good and the bad (ugly, repulsive, loathsome parts). Ugh!

Well, what if he’s repulsed by my ugly parts? What then?

As a result of this fear, I was picking people I believed wouldn’t reject me. People who were flawed enough to see me as out of their league, and lucky just to be with me.

And, more importantly, people who couldn’t tolerate real intimacy.

Because if they really looked at me in my totality, they would most certainly be repulsed and run away…leaving me with undeniable confirmation of my biggest fear:

My imperfections make me repulsive and I am ultimately unlovable.

Oh, the pain!

Most of us will spend a lifetime trying to avoid this seemingly inevitable conclusion.

We will subconsciously avoid quality people who have the capacity to see us, all in a misguided quest to avoid being rejected and feeling such humiliation.

Which leaves us with a chronic, and gnawing existential ache.

It's terrifying to finally let ourselves love somebody who's worthy of us because - for once - we have to consider whether we're actually worthy of them.

Can you relate?

Have you picked these types of partners, or avoided partnership altogether simply to avoid confirmation of your own unworthiness?

Well, the good news is that there are many ways to increase your capacity for emotional intimacy, and thereby, your attraction to emotionally available partners.

Here are some of my favorites:

• Do your shadow work: You must start to accept the parts of yourself that you believe are unlovable. If you can’t accept them, you won’t ever let anyone else get close enough to reject you for them. You can do shadow work with a good therapist or through the To Be Magnetic program (Note: I’m a TBM affiliate because I swear by their program).

• Feel the grief of past rejections: Spend some time really metabolizing the pain of past rejections, going back to early childhood and beyond. Our fear of intimacy is almost always rooted in an attachment wound. Again, a great therapist would be helpful here.

• Let go of perfectionism: Challenge yourself to be less perfect in your day-to-day experiences. Let yourself make mistakes in front of others, and don’t make it such a big deal. Increase your tolerance for being less than perfect.

• Learn how to take accountability: Each of us needs to learn how to rectify pain that we’ve caused others. But oftentimes, we’re afraid of being imperfect because we believe that mistakes lead to abandonment, which can lead us to deny harm that we’ve done in an effort to protect our egos. First of all, start surrounding yourself with people who will stick around even when you mess up. But more importantly, get really good at owning your mistakes, apologizing, and making plans to avoid them in the future (accountability).

As you do this work, you’ll find that your tolerance for being fully seen will steadily increase. And your ability to tolerate the ugliness in others will also increase (because you won’t be staring at your own shadow). 

This not only increases your capacity to love and accept yourself, it increases your capacity to fully love others.

What a beautiful thing!

Because this is where intimacy can thrive.