The two main emotions that we as human beings feel, are fear and love. They are not absolute emotions and can be felt in different ways. Happiness and joy and both aspects of love, just as anger and misery are both aspects of fear.
Many of us grew up feeling that we weren't really loved by our parents and so our experience of love was mostly of sadness and loss. If our parents didn't love us, we also grew up with the feeling that there must be something wrong with us for them not to love us.
As adults we may continue to feel fear in some way when we are in relationships. The inherent feeling that we are flawed because our parents didn't love us, is something that doesn't go away. As adults, we may also fear that those we choose to have relationships with, will also leave us. So we push people away, so that we can leave them before they leave us. We'll then have to rationalise this to ourselves in some way to justify our actions.
If the feelings of being flawed are strong enough, we may find those feelings about ourselves, difficult to accept. None of us want to believe that there is something so fundamentally wrong with us that no-one could love us. So we may attribute our fears to the person we fear losing and convince ourselves that the fears we feel are actually felt by the other person, and therefore we are doing the right thing in pushing this person away.
Clearly, none of us is inherently flawed in any way, even if that is what we believe. The fact that someone chooses to have a relationship with us means that they find us lovable. But this can become a cycle that is difficult to break, and to begin to change our internal programming, we first have to notice the way our ego or critical parent inner voice talks to us.
Our ego will use scaremonger tactics to remove us from perceived danger. It will include words like 'always' and 'never' and convince us that it has our best interests at heart, because it is only trying to keep us safe. We have to take away the power from this internal voice to start to undo this damaging programming.
By being aware of it, we can start to question what it is saying. We can compare what the ego is telling us with objective reality. We can refuse to be overwhelmed by our emotions and think the situation through logically. We can stop reacting to the terrorising inner voice. All of these will help to quieten the ego, that is just trying to protect us from being hurt.
At the same time as becoming the observer of our own thoughts, we also need to re-programme our emotions and change our negative beliefs to positive ones. By repeating affirmations on a regular basis, we will change the neural pathways in the brain that support that belief. So over time, we will feel differently. So saying an affirmation such as 'I am a lovable person and I deserve the best relationship' will over time change our feelings about ourselves in relationship to others.
There is no quick fix for feelings that have taken a lifetime to create, but we can choose to begin changing them at any time, just by the act of observation, questioning the rational validity of the ego defenses and changing our belief in fear to a belief in love.
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