What to do when love isn't safe

Sometimes, the choice to be loving—to be patient, kind, compassionate, caring, or loving—will be the choice that we resist not because we don’t want to be loving, but because love doesn’t feel safe. This is usually because somewhere along the way, we learned that if we were tender and vulnerable, if we were kind or patient, if we were compassionate or caring, we might still be rejected, anyway. That rejection was painful, and in response, we decide—though it doesn’t really feel like a “decision” that love isn’t safe. This is what to do when love isn’t safe:

Clarify Your Defenses

Your defenses are the things you do as an alternative to the loving behavior that you intellectually want to choose, but can’t.

Anger is a defense. Sadness is a defense. Shutting down and being passive-aggressive is a defense.

When you’ve been at the mercy of someone else’s defenses, it hurts. Paradoxically, it’s when we’ve been at the mercy of someone else’s defenses that we are more likely to adopt them as our own! This is both something to untangle and an opportunity to practice compassion (but that comes later).

Recognize Your Triggers

I’m most likely to enact my own defenses when I feel pinched on time, or when someone’s been critical of me. That’s when I most resist being patient and when I most feel irritated and angry with others.

So, that recognition of my triggers is a tool. If I see the triggers, I can show up, differently. Literally, I talk myself through such moments, reminding myself that “I’m triggered right now.”

Recognize your triggers and then when they come up, you can remind yourself, “Ah, yes, this is a trigger for me. I need to be aware of going into a defense.”

Compassion For The Mistakes

I often write throughout this website that recognition and presence around our patterns is the hugest part of the process of change. I do genuinely believe that. If you can see yourself clearly, you’re so, SO far towards change and powerfully choosing in your life.

But right behind that, compassion for the mistakes ranks as a huge part of what to do when love isn’t safe, because the reality is that just because you see what needs to be different doesn’t mean you’ll automatically feel capable of doing anything different.

You will get triggered again. You will lash out again or act from a place of defenses.

Compassion for the mistakes is part of what to do when love isn’t safe—because you have to recreate love as a safe experience.

Compassion recreates love as a safe experience.

Compassion attunes you to what it’s supposed to feel like, to have a challenge and NOT lash out.

Compassion is the opposite of lashing out.

Reckoning

Whatever your particular pattern is that keeps you from the connection you want, that makes love feel like the unsafe option, here’s what I know:

Everything about changing this pattern will feel “all wrong,” especially at first. You’ll probably feel stupid, or changing will seem like a good idea at first, before it then seems utterly lame. There are lots of lies we tell in order to avoid change.

But if you’re like me, and you see that the patterns in place are parasitic, and destroying the host itself, and that the walls are closing in, and that the old defenses are no longer working, and mostly–

–mostly, that there is no where else left to run–

then I have this to promise you: love, compassion, and forgiveness will be waiting there to welcome you with open arms.

No matter how many times you’ve bashed these concepts, not been in integrity, or turned away, when you’re ready to let the defenses come down, you’ve already got the only three tools you need, just waiting to be used–as soon as you’re ready.