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It is Safe to Be Loved Without Expectations
Those who grew up with not-so-ideal family lives, trauma, or chaos never felt safe being themselves.
Even as adults, we’ve struggled to become the people we are. It’s all too easy to hide behind our rote behaviors. The ones we used to cope with as children but don’t help us fit in as adults anymore.
We feel desperate, alone, and unloved as our inner children struggle to push outside the bonds that childhood shoved us into. It’s an internal war, a bout of epic proportions. How to be an adult with healthy boundaries, empathy, and emotional intelligence when we see harm behind every corner. Disregulated nervous systems are ready to jump into anxiety and distress despite relative calm.
And how our inner subconscious joys in stirring up drama, the familiar tingle of conflict, both terrifies us and makes us feel utterly comfortable in our skins. Even as we feel in our bones, we can’t take one more minute of the bad. We know how unsustainable it is to live in spaces of fear, guilt, and shame.
We do it, regardless, because it’s what we know, right? It’s easy to slip into the skin of someone hurt. We victimize ourselves repeatedly as we flounder to deal with the relationship rules of people who have no idea what it is to have an unreliable primary caregiver. Or worse, we end up in a relationship with someone we’ve trauma-bonded with who has even less idea of how much damage they’ve been through before us.
We unreasonably expect things to change because we don’t recognize that we are trying to recreate our first relationships. Instead, we cling to uncomfortably comfortable emotions and struggle to be loved.
It’s hard work to yank ourselves from our hamster wheels.
The difficult task is to give ourselves permission to work through those hurts, allowing ourselves to feel every emotion safely.
We can’t do this alone.
In the end, though, it’s worth it. Because the journey from hurt and pain is the full realization that it is safe to be loved without expectation.
