THE HARD BUT WONDERFUL TASK OF OPENING THE HEART AGAIN
Can anyone love without personally knowing what love is?
Us humans have been facing a pathological global situation related to love and hate for thousands of years. While it aggravates, a few dare to delve for comprehending what is happening to us. On one side, hatred is repressed when we are young; we are castrated from the possibility to express anger; on the other side they teach us that love is related to the other, to giving, to ceding, to bearing, to accepting blackmail. In the face of these two united variables in which hatred is repressed and love is adulterated, the human being is margined from the possibility of experimenting it and disabled from expressing it. The consequences for life are tragic, and are manifested in infinite ways through daily life. All that affective deficiency produces nuclei of anger, rage, annoyance and aggression. The frustration for not being able to feel and enjoy love generates an anguish of such magnitude that we cannot do anything else than avoiding as much as possible anything that increases this suffering; and on the other hand do all sorts of things to distract ourselves and forget that internal reality of sentimental dissatisfaction.
It seems untrue that even when our parents swear that they love us and that they have given us love, we have not felt authentic love from them, that we have not perceived unconditional acceptance, respect for our Being. When parents are interested in making their children in their own image, they cannot feel love or open easily to the love of other people. Parents are essentially mistaken in the ways of manifesting the most valuable feeling for human development. Maybe it is for having so many interposed conceptual and behavioural errors about what love is and how it is expressed.
In an interview, Chilean psychiatrist Claudio Naranjo has affirmed that when a psychotherapist helps an adult normally, it speaks of the multitude of shortcomings that the child could not satisfy. “The complaint from the child that lives inside the adult appears, it starts to complain about what he/she did not know how to complain during childhood”. He explains: “Rage must be felt.” According to Naranjo, it is tremendously important that adults are able to “awaken” that “inner child angry with the frustration of his/her parents”, in which one can even “accuse them” and they are able to feel the apparently irrational rage they had as children. “Because without permission to feel that rage, one lives like a castrated animal”, he asserts.
The Chilean psychiatrist assures that human beings “are like those circus lions that are forced to go through a flaming hoop by using huger and a whip”. “Every animal can be domesticated, there comes a moment in which the animal surrenders. That happens with life, human as well, we must give back the healing from pain and the childhood rage to adults so they can be whole again”, he assures.
“To love there has to be the freedom of saying yes or no, one cannot be a domesticated animal”, affirms Naranjo, adding that we must leave behind phrases like “I have to be a good boy” or “I have to love my father or mother”. The expert stresses that “only from there can love be properly recovered.”
“Unconditional rage is like the start of a new freedom”, he points out. In this sense, the psychiatrist highlights that that there is a contradiction with Christian ethics, “that preaches love to the other but not love to oneself.” “He says: ‘love the other like you love yourself’, but in practice the message transmitted through culture is: ‘do not love yourself’, remember. “The problem with that is that love for the other does not work if there is no love for oneself”, he adds.
I tag in on Naranjo’s affirmations to delve a bit deeper into the fact that it is tremendously complicated, to avoid saying impossible, to love myself if I have not been loved, and love is something that is learned and known from the perception of being loved, the experience of having been accepted and respected; without that, love does not exist inside a person, rather the need to take revenge on others for not having loved us or rejecting us.
Anger is repressed love. When anger is repressed, submission is born. Submission is repressed hate.
It is revolutionary to propose: Love yourself before you love others; because it goes against everything our prostitute culture teaches; but it is even more defying to propose: OPEN UP TO LOVE! STOP RESISTING WHAT YOU WISH FOR SO MUCH! ALLOW OTHERS TO LOVE YOU…! Being able to recover the original perception we had about love before experimenting different kinds of traumas, is like opening the heart again.
WHEN A HEART IS OPENED TO LOVE, THEN IT STARTS PERCEIVING LOVE EVEN IN THE GAZE OF ANIAMLS OR THE LIGHT OF STARS… IT IS WHEN WE REALISE THAT EXISTENCE HAS MADE US PERFECT AND ACCEPTS US AS WE ARE, THAT WE ARE LOVED BY CREATION, THAT WE ARE WELCOME BY LIFE. IF AFTERWARDS THERE IS ONE OR MANY PEOPLE WHO APPROACH ME TO LOVE ME, MUCH BETTER.
Love is a phenomenon that is possible through opening, a magnet that activates, an energy that is attracted, the direction of love is inwards, and that is why it depends on release and allowing ourselves to receive it from the feelings of dignity and merit.
The therapeutic process to recover love is a process of reopening and reconciliation, and it has a very blunt logic. A subtle step-by-step, very delicate and in order can help us a lot in the way back to love. Without forgetting to go through each step.
1- Realising the distortion we have about love. See the incorrect association we do between love and suffering.
2- Admit we do not know what love is and that we have not experienced it fully; that our parents have provided us with care, protection, nourishment, material and emotional things, but not love.
3- Allow anger and rage to come out (in a therapeutically controlled environment) because of the fact that we have been castrated, frustrated and traumatised. Connect with the hate to ourselves for having allowed it.
4- Comprehend our parents because they could not give us what they did not receive. Forgive them and forgive ourselves because we interpreted that we did not deserve love. Heal the error of perception.
5- Recover the dignity and feeling of merit restructuring perception, disarming inadequate ideas and false concepts about love and ourselves. Feel that love is for me, that I am worthy.
6- Take the leap by exposing ourselves to others, giving in to the possibility of being loved, opening the heart to love, leaving behind what happened and giving life the chance to fill us with love.
7- Receiving, feeling happiness for being loved, thanking that we are receiving what we longed for so much, not fleeing or reaching conclusions, not reproaching anything to anyone, not intending to be loved in some way, accepting being accepted.
8- Opening ourselves to share the love we receive; letting it come out spontaneously in all directions.
All affective deficiencies can be healed, but it is necessary to return to the point in which we were open to being loved, and that purity, which at that moment was used to condition and program us, now will be transformed into trust. The prelude to LOVE.
What really damaged our insides was not the lack of love, but the beginning of distrust. Distrust is what keeps all the traumata alive.
WHEN THE NEED TO PROJECT HATE IS SUBSTITUTED BY THE NEED TO PROJECT LOVE, THE SOUL HAS BEEN HEALED.
Alberto José Varela