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If you have suffered disappointing and painful relationships, and or parenting that violated boundaries, you may not realise how closed off you are to receiving love….

I can relate, as this has been a huge challenge in my own life.

When recovering from abusive and / or narcissistic relationships, we can establish deservedness, boundaries and well-being – and we may have risen to a level in our own personal development where we are incredibly happy, fulfilled and productive as a single person in our own skin…

Yet what happens when a potential love partner enters your life who is fully available to love you and connect to you?

What happens if you heart is not open enough to be able to receive this powerful level of love?

When our heart isn’t open, our defence mechanisms may include not being able to feel like we’re in love. We may have to really force ourselves to reply to loving messages, and struggling to want to initiate and return kisses, affection and sex.

This can feel distressing, confusing and lead to the agonising questions. Do I love him or her? Is this the one? Is this me?

 

What Happens if You are too Fearful and Blocked to Reciprocate Love?

Maybe you did not realise that you are in fact unavailable to really love, until this happens to you.

Of course this is going to create difficulties in your love relationship, and I wrote about this in detail in my recent blog about The Love Addict and The Love Avoidant.

The truth of the matter is, you can only experience what you are prepared to ‘be’ yourself. And if you have not let go of the fear and the pain of your past, you won’t be able to fully give of yourself, regardless of how much your love partner tries to love you out of your fears.

In fact you may experience that the more he or she does try to love you, the more you retreat into yourself, and don’t know how to come out.

It is a common deep inner programmed fear, if you are blocked off, that if you do open up to love, and receive it fully you will become vulnerable, powerless, and be unable to disconnect if you get damaged.

And, especially if you did have parents that violated your boundaries, and seldom allowed you personal space – you will fear that connecting, sharing and ‘being’ with another intimate being means they can take over your life, control you and take away your personal identity.

Because of these deep unconscious fears, even though you know you should be connecting to love more, you will feel that when your partner expresses how unhappy they are, you may come up with every excuse and justification to stay where you are with your guard up.

It is very easy from this place to believe that your partner is controlling, intrusive and demanding.

Please note it is very important to know the difference between someone wanting to authentically love you and a narcissist pretending to love you in order to receive narcissistic supply. If you are confused about the difference please see these articles: Narcissism Understood and Common NPD Traits and Behaviours.

If you partner is authentically trying to love you, and you can’t reciprocate, you are robbing yourself and your partner the true glory of love.

 

Becoming Open Enough To Love

So many people, due to the pain of the past are defensive. We can get all serious, practical and try to stay in our heads when dealing with partners. I promise you, even though, we do need to practically and logically understand the difference between who is or isn’t healthy, and what healthy boundaries are – our ultimate goal is to become a divine, receptive, being – because we truly can’t receive and reciprocate love until we do this.

Some people have this talent naturally. They know how to support their partner, stay in their heart and be the epitome of compassion and love towards them. They know that all people have unconscious moments and they keep their eyes and their hearts on being love rather than adding to problems counter-productively.

These people know how to state their needs in healthy, calm and loving ways, and they know how to adore their partner, not forsake them for his or her faults, and to bring the best out in them by loving and supporting them.

I am describing my personal story here, which I know is the story of so many other men and women who felt trapped, intimidated and controlled in their childhoods, suffered abusive relationships and then found it difficult to connect to and allow real love.

During the last couple of months I have fully realised, yes I know how to honour myself, yes I know what real love looks like, and I know what does or does not constitute healthy love – but I was not ready to fully receive true love. And I knew this was my next lesson.

My next challenge, that I also know may be your challenge too, is to become a woman who lives and loves fully without fear, pain, trauma and becomes love, gentleness and compassion. In no way do I believe that this is about being a ‘doormat’ or not being able to have healthy boundaries.

This evolutionary level of ‘love’ is about being able to flow with love, be open to love and to attract and create more love, as well as reduce the likelihood of pain, fear and heartbreak.

The most powerful gift of becoming this woman is to be able to partake in and experience the grandest experience of love possible – the divine connection of two people intimately in love.

Pretty exciting hey!

As a part of this exciting and powerful journey I am taking it so much further than establishing the gift of creating and knowing boundaries and breaking out of co-dependent patterns.

This journey is now about confronting all fear and pain and dissolving it with love, compassion, forgiveness – it is about facing these demons, and doing the healing work that will open my heart up fully with no reservations and fear.

This journey is about using the techniques that has deep meaning to me to fling my heart open and fully feel everything without reservation and without fear, and to know all of it is glorious.

You see, if we are shut down, we cut of the bad feelings, (because we judged them as pain, fear and wrong) and we didn’t realise we shut down the great ones as well…and as a result we don’t really have our heart open to love.

Listen to yourself. Is your heart open to love? Are you able to allow real love without fear? Do you dance, play, rejoice and connect to life? Or do you feel resistances and blocks that are keeping you from experiencing real love?

Ask yourself – with the love I have now (if non-narcissistic) can I fully love, connect, play, feel and give myself without reservation? Do I feel butterflies in my stomach when I think of my partner? Do I know I love him or her with a feeling of fullness, joy and delight in my heart?

Ask yourself  if you are single – can I feel love within myself and for a future partner that feels powerful, real, full, exciting, amazing and I can picture and feel what this is like in every cell of my being?

Ask yourself – when I am in a love relationship, am I able to apply myself with grace, gentleness, wisdom and believe in and back my partner? Do I love him/her and trust him/her even when he or she is not the ‘perfect’ being my ego would like him or her to be?

Ask yourself – do I want to be a divine, receptive being of the highest order to experience the grandest version of love that can be possible?

Please feel free to share some of your answers below or ask any questions you may have about being open to love.

 

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Commments (13) + Leave a comments

13 thoughts on “Is Your Heart Open To Love?

  1. Hi Melanie,

    How do you begin to allow others to love you, and love them in return, when loving yourself can still be a daily challenge?

  2. Beautiful and inspiring Melanie; thank you so much….

    It reminds me of something I read the other day:

    “Fear knocked at the door

    Love answered…

    And there was no one there…”

    (from Courage-Overcoming Fear …..by Debbie Ford).

    If we can be love and gentleness and compassion as you say, to every seand ntient being that we meet, and those unmet and unseen- we truly will be fulfilling our life purpose and creating “A New Earth”….
    You are much loved and cherished Melanie
    and you already are Gentleness, Compassion and Love as well as an inspiration to me and to so many others….so it’s a joy to know we are all striving towards being more loving and compassionate together

    Amy I love your question to Melanie!! This is something we all ask sometimes..
    Know how much you matter Amy; know what a gift your love is; know how precious and unique you are and how much all beings and creatures want to be loved and you can give that….it really is the reason we are all here I think …to learn to be love and compassion as Melanie says…
    xx

  3. Hi Val,

    thank you for your beautiful reply to Amy.

    Divine as always!!

    Just to expand on that – definitely Amy it is so important to ‘self-develop’, to put the work into yourself to honour you, believe in you and gain valuable self-esteem and self-love.

    At the beginning it is an ‘inner job’…and it consists of reading the right material, journaling, doing the right personal development courses, seeing the right therapists and putting the work in.
    This is essential for all of us to be good partners to ourself and others.

    Hope this helps

    Mel xx

  4. Hi Mel,
    As ever, great article. I have recently had an experience which showed me how much pain and fear I was still in around love relationships. My family backround was a Narc mother and a father who enabled her, he was totally absorbed in placating her. He was also very enmeshed with his own mother and had limited time for me. As a result of a lot of work on myself, I no longer attract Narcs but I was still attracting men who, like Dad, were emotionally unavailable to me. I had HUGE abandonment issues and was actually re-creating scenarios in which I would once again, be abandoned. Like you, I am now working on being a woman who loves without fear, and I am so grateful for your help. Isnt it strange how our most painful experiences turn out to be our biggest blessings and sources of healing?
    Love, Sylvia xxx

  5. Melanie you give us both sides of the spectrum.
    The unhealthy qualities of narcissistic relationships…and bridge us to the other side, qualities of a healthy loving relationships.

    This is what I call true guidance.

    Do you remember or know of an 80’s song, ‘I am going to Harden My Heart’. I sang that a lot.unfortunately.

  6. I have found great strength and inspiration from your words Melanie, you understand exactly what victims of Narc abuse are going through.
    My seven year ‘relationship” with my now ex-Narc partner ended 4 months ago.
    Although I have always considered myself an independent and strong person, emotionally I am somewhat needy (in that I need to be loved). I, like many others on this site have abandonment issues which I have suffered since childhood. I guess I have been ripe ‘fodder’ for selfish, abusive , ego-driven males. It is sad that some men feel the need to exploit and diminish the loving qualities of good women whose only fault is that they love too much and expect to be loved in return. Sadly, I have only recently come to terms with the fact that expecting someone to love you back means you are “co- dependent” . I am naturally a giving person but would not have considered this to be a negative quality in myself, however I now realise that loving someone and wanting the best for them does not mean you sacrifice yourself in the process, which I have been guilty of to a degree in the past.
    A few weeks ago my mother passed away.. it was a difficult time. There was a part of me that wanted my ex partner to share my grief, but I knew if I told him it would all be about him. So I haven’t told him and don’t plan to. I wish he would have been there for me when I needed him but then he never was, unless there was something in it for him.
    The road to recovery following a relationship with a narcissist is slow and painful. Because there is no closure, you have no answers and are left to try and come to terms with the aftermath.
    It is a lonely place to be. Mutual friends who have been taken in by the narcissist begin to question whether perhaps you are the reason the relationship didn’t work out, and slowly even your friends begin to disappear.
    When you are emotionally abused and have your heart crushed over and over it is sometimes difficult to believe that anyone could ever love you just for being you.
    Maybe it is too soon for me to become “open to love”. For now, I am coming to terms with the years I have wasted on trying to love someone who I finally realise was never capable of loving me in return; this is for me the hardest lesson of all.
    Thanks Melanie for your wisdom and understanding.. your website has been a life saver for me xx

    1. Hi Cathy,

      You were right not to share your grief (unfortunately). My experience when my mother was put into palliative care not long before she passed away, was that I was bombarded daily with 8 or more texts during business hours, from my Narc, about his sexual fantasies. He had not been interested in sharing any sexual fantasies prior to this, and he knew my phone would normally on silent at work except I was expecting news about Mum. This behaviour was so obviously aimed at letting me know that his sexual fantasies should be more important to me than my dying mother (as well as being available for the rest of my family at a difficult time!).

      It was only a little bit more than a year into our relationship and unsurprisingly things went downhill very quickly from there, so thankfully it prevented me from committing more emotionally, materially and financially (lucky me!). However it still took a few years more to extricate myself. But it wasn’t until I found Melanie’s website that I realised that all the the ‘humble apologies’ (eg “I don’t know why I act like an idiot when it comes to you”) were completely insincere, and I started to look even deeper for inconsistencies that pointed to lies even more far-reaching than the ones I had found out about. I am beginning to belive that just about everything that everyone thinks they know about him, is a complete lie. His whole persona and life history is a complete fabrication. There is no genuine human being underneath all the fakery.

      This knowledge has made “no contact” much easier, despite being baited by rubbish claims of self-realisation and repentance and promises to change and make amends. Thanks to Mel I have also been able to resist other kinds of baiting, such as being told that I have been forgiven for what I have done to HIM, eg unwittingly revealing the lies he told me, by repeating them to other people he knows! Of course none of that is my fault! Initially it was difficult not to actively resist such irrational claims but I’m now aware that I can’t win by arguing against them.

      So now I consider that my gift from this relationship is greater wisdom and self-awareness, as well as greater awareness of what’s going on with people arround me. A hard lesson but one that I had to learn.

  7. Hi Melanie and everyone else reading,

    I have read so much of your work, listened to some of the radio recordings, and participated in your free radio Quanta Healing Session, and have now read this article Melanie.

    Thank you, sincerely for this sharing this journey – there is a big wide google world out there, a really small community of real life people around me, but i can only find one Melanie Tonia Evans. Melanie and this online community have given me the tools, the practical stuff I need, the words to use in my daily practice, and I am so thankfull to you. Thank you.

    I am still reeling with exitment and joy from the Quanta Healing experience, that was about three weeks ago, and Melanie, I have tried EVERYTHING… I’m nearly middle aged now, and finally I feel like I have been set free. I know this is only a beginning, and I have a lot more work to do… but one thing is for sure, that experience for me was so profound, and so real, it has affected me so deeply… so much so, I am enjoying this relationship i am having with myself, I am not that concerned with a love relationship with anyone else (yes still going through stuff, but so much less so), cause I am strutting my stuff only for me. I have always wanted that true love experience and to give it freely. But I was blocked and have only been able to attract that block as a way of healing my own deep hurt. I think all my fellow beings will be hurt in one form or another, and it will only be when honesty comes in the form of an open love to work towards those common goals, as you have written about Mel in your ebooks.

    Melanie, thank you for your clarity. Thank you for your articluation. I think you are stunning. Your heart is love, and it is very powerfully free to give and receive that from where i can see from.

    With Respect

    Me x

  8. Hi Amy, I related so much to everything you wrote. I finally decided I couldn’t take anymore from my Narc partner four months ago, it was also during the week my mother was taken seriously ill. He knew I was very worried about what would happen as she was overseas and I knew I would have to make arrangements to go home. Similar to what happened to you, he also kept texting and phoning me but not once asked how I was or how my mother was doing. It was all meaningless juvenile rubbish, on one occasion he rang to say he saw a ‘really good sort’ in the street. He also just went “off” about the least thing and would say it was my fault he was behaving just like me. Everything was always my fault, or someone’s fault, he would never take responsibility for his behaviour. Looking back now I realise at that time he was just looking for attention (supply) because he knew my focus was elsewhere. He was not capable even then of thinking about anyone but himself and his needs.
    I finally realised that week what a shallow, nasty individual he was, devoid of all empathy and human emotion. I had seen many examples of his selfishness previously, but that week I knew I could no longer tolerate being near him. I finally had enough. He has tried to contact me many times but I refuse to have anything to do with him. It has taken seven years to break free and even now occasionally I find myself thinking he will have an epiphany and realise the hurt he has caused to not only me but many others. I know this will never happen. Sadly he has convinced my family and friends what a great guy he is and I have not been able to tell them the truth about the torment he has put me through, they would not understand.
    I spent many years trying to understand my partner, I even thought I would be able to fix him until I realised what I was dealing with. All that wasted time and energy. Now I know I have to learn to love and value myself and start to trust again. I have read all the material from Melanie’s website and have found the archive material from the Radio podcasts very helpful. It is sad to know there are so many fellow sufferers but good that we have survived and are in the best place to get the help we need to recover, for that I am truly grateful.

  9. Hi to all the ladies who have lived through and survived life with a Narc….and who seem to have become stronger as a result of moving on. I am coming up to 2 years since I walked away, and honestly feel like an addict….still counting the months since I walked away. Emotionally, I am still dealing with the damage done….I feel afraid to let someone close again….after all, how could I not see what he was and how can I be sure I will not attract the same sort of man again. I seem not able to completely get him out of my mind and without the constant contact he needed, my life now seems to have a large void which has not yet been filled. I admire all the ladies who have managed to move on and hope to forgive myself for allowing him to use me for so long….my anger is towards him, but more so towards myself for having allowed him to control and hurt me. I saw the selfishness and self absorbtion and saw he was just like my father, but still I made excuses and stayed when I should have kept my dignity and left. I became a person I did not like in his company and I still do not know who the real me is….I hope I find out soon as I am in my mid 50s and want to enjoy life again soon….good luck to all of you and thanks Melanie…I like to read your comments

  10. Hi all,
    its been four years and one month for me after twenty three years…i made it out by the skin of my teeth, my will and my inner strength. here is the poem i wrote that looking back awakened me to what i had married. I hope it empowers you to know we are not alone. xxx

    The Power of Choice
    By EJ Paterson

    Please help me I say, from the core of my soul
    Which is battered and bruised from the hideous control.
    Domestic Violence is Terrorism, in the home and the heart
    It is the most suppressed kind, of torture I know.

    ABUSE doesn’t always come in a loud roaring tone
    It is sanctimoniously delivered as he whispers in my ear
    Its not sweet nothings as though it would appear
    Its horrific, its cruel, its crippling and mean
    Its destruction, dysfunction all controlled by FEAR.

    The silence is piercing and terrorism is imminent
    Like waiting on the plate for the ball to be pitched
    No idea of direction, of speed or strength
    On guard I wait to cover my base.

    The curve ball from left, is what I expect
    The attack so severe the defence so weak
    Moments of fear, destruction and torture
    “Your tears are a weapon” as I cry and not speak.

    Strike one; I’m down and no where to run
    Face the onslaught of what’s about to take place
    Reading the play, as it churns in my soul
    “You have no credibility” I miss again to save face.

    Strike two; I beg, yet not on my knees
    Time ticking by with anticipation high
    Power and Control are reigning supreme
    “You will not scream” but I will not lie.

    Strike three; I’m out its time to go,
    The punishing silence, the push, the pain
    Game over, I choose life over death
    “Its my life” I say and my safety will remain.

    Its starts up again as I leave the ball park
    The memories, the injustice, the right to survive
    In the lounge room, the bedroom, the courtroom I pray
    With children and scars, I thank god we’re alive.

    With dread, fright and panic that his lawyers instil
    These bullying tactics are no longer to be
    Change is essential and focus I must
    As others have sacrificed the ultimate before me.

    Entrapment beckons with lawyers in tow
    But no one to stand up and say it is wrong
    Only me to decide what is to be
    The road being tedious, tumultuous, insidious and long

    Growing tired and exhausted, weary and sore
    With no money left to pay the huge legal bill
    Nothing to hide and proud to be me
    All I have is my children, my dignity and my will.

    With chains with roadblocks, it doesn’t matter anymore
    I’ve been through the tunnels of torment before
    With my children alongside in the darkness of horror
    Change on the cusp, of what is in store.

    A writer I am, no fear in my words
    Erin Brockovich, Bono or Geldof I’m not
    Just a brave little person breaking the silence
    on a life of fear, intimidation and violence.

    With courage I stride gathering kindness from many
    Speak up I will for me to grow tall.
    My heart in tatters, my spirit crushed
    Trying to stop the pain of it all.

    For my children and me
    We wear no shame,
    We are wholesome and good
    Not scapegoats for blame.

    The silence is broken, the wisdom is known
    The barriers removed, the door no longer shut
    There’s no turning back in the darkest of tunnels
    It’s too black to reveal the deepest of cuts.

    In a world of self battles, delusion and grandeur
    The terrorist lives on, though not on TV
    It takes strength, courage and the will to survive
    Plus the power of choice to say “NO! he’s not living with me”.

    Strike me once, I chose to cry in pain;
    Strike me twice, I chose to run and save face
    Strike me three times; I chose to walk the Safety path with my children, my pride and my battered soul to fight for our freedom.
    Strike me never again.

  11. I find this so difficult, my fear of intimacy is overwhelming. Never having received any type of parental love, or care, without shame, guilt or emotional abuse, I don’t know how to recognize authentic caring emotions, or how to except them.
    Yes I hear self love etc, but what is that, when you are indoctrinate with self sacrifice. I can’t understand it
    Please explain, I just can’t find the connection.

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