Let’s talk about love. Let’s talk about true love. What is true love? That’s what today’s video is about.
I’m Stacy Rocklein and I help people learn to love themselves more unconditionally so that they can love the people in their lives more fully and have the ability to receive love.
So this is what we sometimes think love is. It’s about building a case of who this person is. We want to think of them as good. We want to think of our parents is good. We want to think of our spouses as good. You want to think of our children is good. So we think about all the things that they do that are good and we try to dismiss the things that are not good or we try to ignore their mistakes or we try to bury those things down and not give any attention to those things because we’re trying to create evidence that they’re this good person and that’s who we love.
But what is happening is that we are loving a version that we’ve created in our minds and our version is based on a judgment of what a good person does. We use that judgment and then the manipulation of what has actually happened to create this person that we love. And so when they make a mistake, we want to be dismissive. We want to not pay attention to that because we want to keep thinking of them as good, right?
Here’s the problem. If then you flip it towards yourself, you can feel that. That means that you also need to make a case that you are good. And when you have to make a case that you’re good, what do we have to do with our mistakes? We have to bury them down. We have to ignore them. We have to not let anybody find out about them because we want to be good. And we want people to love us.
So I’m going to argue that that’s not actually true love. That is conditional love. That is loving somebody for all their good things and trying to ignore the bad things. But here’s the deal, if you want to truly, truly love somebody completely and unconditionally and through and through, you have to acknowledge their mistakes. You have to acknowledge that sometimes they do things that might hurt you or hurt somebody else. You have to accept their whole selves and you have to accept them in totality.
So actually by looking at their mistakes and by accepting their mistakes along with all the wonderful things that they do, that is when you are giving them the biggest gift of love because you’re not sending the message that I only want to see the happy. I only want to see the light. I only want to see the good stuff. I’m going to pretend that that’s you and I’m going to love you for that.
That’s just some of your heart. Your total heart is when you’re saying, I see you, I see all of you. I see everything about you and I love you. Because of all of that. That is truly unconditional love. That is when we are truly loving somebody.
We can make a case that judgment is the problem, right? Just judging things as good or bad is probably the problem, but we’re also human and so we do that. So until you’re going to be judgment free, good luck. What we need to do is accept all things as perfectly OK. Just accept it all. Even if we’re judging it as bad or judging it as good, accept it all and accept all of a person and that is when you’re truly loving them and it’s the greatest gift you could ever give them.
So you’ve set somebody up in your mind as good. This is what we do. This is what I do with clients. They pull up some memories from the past and sometimes the people that they really want to love have made mistakes that have hurt them and they want to resist that. They want to resist looking at those mistakes because they think then that is in some way going to affect the goodness of the person. But actually it is by allowing those mistakes as they come up, accepting them, that you’re truly loving the person exactly as they are. Not the who you created that they are, but who they are.
So something to think about today when it comes to our relationships and people that we love in our lives. How can we love them even when they show us the side that might hurt us or that doesn’t align with who we think they are in our heads? How can we love that? Love that part and love them through that. That is the true gift of love and we all deserve to give it and we all deserve to receive it.
Thank you very much for watching and by sharing these messages of love, I get to continue to spread this further and you get to help me do that and I appreciate it so much because there can always be more love for ourselves and our relationships and in our world. So thank you so much for that. I’ll see you next time.
Hey, let’s connect! I’d love to hear from you. You can find me on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. I f you’d like to sign up for my weekly newsletter, The Love List, scroll to the bottom of the page.