Why Do I Have to Do All This Work? Why Not Her?

I’ve been thinking about you.

Thinking about how to put into words the core meaning of my message to you.

Yes, it’s about finding out who you are and shedding old programming, etc. But the question you explicity ask is the one that needs more of an answer to get to the real root of what I’m talking about.

Why? Why do I HAVE to do this work? Why does SHE get to find love, get married, find someone to love her for who she is? Why does SHE get him without doing all the work? Why do I HAVE to go on this journey to figure out who I am FIRST?

Why me? Why not HER?

We're angry. So angry. Most of which we’re not even aware of.

But we can’t be angry. We may get sad, but we don’t do angry. Maybe frustrated – as we’ve learned to downplay it because it won’t fit the good little girl image we have to uphold at all costs - but not angry. Because that’s scary.

But if we're honest with ourselves, angry is exactly what most of us are.

We worked so hard at being perfect, at being good, at being honest and compassionate and empathetic and everything else, but for all that work we didn’t even realize that's what we were doing because it was just expected of us.  So we aimed to please and conform to those expectations to be loved ourselves, but no one ever reciprocated back to us the same. No one!

And that hurts.

That’s what we’re so angry about.

We kept our end of the bargain that was programmed into us from the beginning of our lives. Be a good little girl and you will be loved. Be a well-behaved young woman and you will be loved. Be a well-behaved adult woman and you will be loved.

But where’s the love? There’s only heartbreak for us. We love and we love and we keep on loving but all we have to show for it is heartbreak after heartbreak.

He leaves or can’t commit in the first place, or gaslights and abuses us. We keep our emotions in check as well as we can and keep on loving and giving and caring and being the women we have to be.

Until the last straw, until the dam breaks and we find ourselves no longer able to keep up the façade.

The volcano erupts, the words blurt out, the tears flow and he calls us crazy, and confirms for himself he knew all along that we were just like his mother and every other woman he’d been warned about.

There is no such thing as unconditional love, he contends.

And to you, that's the worst thing he can ever give you because it cuts through to the very heart of what you pride yourself on; being so full of unconditional love unlike anyone else and especially not like any of them.

Do you see what’s going on here?

It’s not that you’re pretending to be someone you’re not in being capable of giving unconditional love; it’s that it’s simply not possible to love anyone unconditionally when you yourself are so craving that unconditional love for yourself!

We’ve been sold such a lie to say that’s the standard we have to uphold, the standard we have to live up to if we’re going to prove our worth and become worthy of having such a love as this for ourselves.

But wouldn’t it be so much easier if we could come out from behind this façade, this deep programming that’s so unfairly left us a standard that no human being can ever live up to?

Wouldn’t it be so much easier to be true enough to yourself first to acknowledge that you love like a human being, not like some perfect "beyond human" being, who doesn’t need anything for herself but can simply give and give and give without any wellspring of love first being received within herself?

Wouldn’t that be such a relief to love like that instead and know that was enough to be loved for yourself, too?

If all of us were loved like this from the time we entered the world, with an unconditional love ourselves, then it would be easy for us to love like this because it was modeled for us.

We would have full enough cups to be able give that love out, too! For some rarer versions of us, this is true. Some of us were fortunate enough to be given this rare gift, and in turn, we gift it back to others.

But for most of us, raised by parents who were only capable of giving us what they were given, we've never known what it was like to have our cups filled to the brim with love.

And in a culture that shames us for ever questioning the very mothers who gave birth to us and raised us and did everything they did for us, and fathers who went to work every day to work hard to provide for us, there isn’t any room for us to look at our own needs or to see what we so desperately needed instead.

And that’s precisely the problem.

We’re going around pretending to be someone we’re not. Someone perfect. Someone who doesn’t get angry, who doesn’t have those emotions we’re not supposed to have.

If we were straight out gossipy, catty, judgemental and sometimes even a little mean, we could accept these things about ourselves and get on with the business of simply looking for another imperfect human being to love and be loved by. But there's so much more to our story!

That’s why so many people in relationships who aren’t nearly as perfect as we try to be, get what we feel we can’t.

But we’re the ones who deny that’s who we are. We’re the ones who would never admit to our deepest emotions, our worst behaviors, and our darkest thoughts. And that’s precisely why we have such a hard time being loved because we don’t embrace or accept any of those darker, deeper, less desirable parts - our quintessential human parts - of ourselves.

Until we do.

That’s why those of us who want more, who sense more, or feel more, or need more and refuse to settle for anything less than a full, unconditional love, find ourselves here.

Because it begins right here, looking in the mirror.

We can’t love until we’re real. Not the real we think we already are, but the real kind that sees through to the core of our being. We can’t love until we can recognize who and what we are and more importantly, we can’t love until we accept our own stories, our own reality, our own imperfections and shortcomings and embrace the reality of it all.

It’s so much easier when we’re not trying to be someone we’re not. When we’re not having to push off the feelings that come so naturally given all we’ve been through.

That’s why we have to do this work!

Not because we can’t find love without doing it, but because the kind of love we’re looking for calls us to first love ourselves so we can even see the gaping hole we’re trying to fill with someone else. It obscures the fact that what we first need to do, is simply fill the hole with our own love and acceptance.

Otherwise, we’re always open and willing to pay any price to have it filled by some guy who only wants to take what he can for himself. When we’re living far from our own truth and acceptance of who and what we are, we attract someone that’s living that way, too.

When we recognize that only we can fill that hole with our own living of our life, with our own shedding of our past stories, and opening to our real truth, something happens. A calm easy existence replaces our panic of being too old, too unattractive, too wrong, too much, too whatever our own programming tells us we are.

We become real.

And we finally begin to attract someone who's been doing this work himself. Someone with something more to give us than false promises and words that never amount to anything more than talk.

Someone real.

You ready for this? Good. Let’s go! If this resonated with you, I want to hear from you. I'd love to meet you and hear some of your story in the comments below.