When it comes to relationships, what do we really want?

Most of us would answer it by saying, “I just want to be happy”, but happiness comes in a lot of forms.
For some of us, we just want to have a stable situation. We want somebody who is consistent in our lives. Not somebody who is going to make us guess from one minute to the next, how they feel about us. Some of us want consistent kindness, where we’re held in high regard, and we’re not criticized all the time. Some of us want to know from one minute to the next, where we stand.  We don’t want to be confused wondering, “Should I stay? Should I go?”

But at the end of the day, with these different things that we long for, we just want to be loved, but there’s a problem.
You cannot have the relationship that you truly want so long as you continue to believe lies about love. There are a lot of lies that we believe about love, but the number one most insidious lie, permeating your ability to have a consistent, stable, loving, kind, respectful, mutually beneficial relationship is the lie that love hurts.

The truth is love can only ever be loving. Love is not pain. Pain is pain.

I want to work with you to properly diagnose where that lie lives within you.
I really believe that. I think you can only solve a problem to the level of your understanding of that problem. At the end of the day, true transformation happens when we understand ourselves and why we are attracting, settling, and suffering in painful relationships. That is the root of it all. My aim is to rip up that root and replace it with the truth so that you can grow better fruit in your life.

Where do we learn about love?  We learned it from our teachers and some of us had really good teachers, but I guarantee if you’re here, you didn’t have the best teacher about love.  I didn’t either. That’s why I dedicated my whole entire life to figuring out what love is and what isn’t. Where did you learn love is pain? Our point of origin is our rearing.

Some teachers are good, and some aren’t. I remember when I was in seventh grade and I wanted to learn French, I was excited to learn French. The teacher came in and the first thing we learned how to say, “May I sharpen my pencil?” but she taught it with the worst back woods Pennsylvania accent. So, we had no example of how to say it and sound authentic. I knew it didn’t sound right, but I still didn’t know how to say it the right way. It wasn’t until I had a better teacher, in college that I learned a better way.

Love is the same. If we want to love better, we must have better teachers. There are many ways our original teachers fail us when it comes to teaching about love. And we learn love is pain though the way they love us.

The first failed teaching when you have a rejecting parent. Rejection hurts. We can all agree, but how do our signals get crossed? You might have had a very critical parent that tells you constantly all the things you’re doing wrong, all the ways you’re not measuring up, all the ways that you’re screwing up.

Now, this could be traumatic including verbal and emotional abuse or just hyper critical. You’re constantly under this shroud of criticism. That instills a rejection wound. You learn who you are isn’t good enough. Now, how we get confused is the parent who is rejecting you usually follows that by saying, “I’m only telling you this because I love you. I love you so I’m the only one who’s going to tell you the truth.”

You don’t want to think that your parents don’t love you. Even the mean ones.  So. you try to hustle and scramble to make sense of why they’re treating you that way. Usually, it’s not because they’re messed up. As a kid, you think, well, I must be broken or wrong, and if I’m better, then they’ll love me more. So you start to think, yeah, they do love me, and they’re critical of me. They do love me, and they are rejecting me. Well, I guess love hurts.

But the truth is rejection hurts and love heals.  When you are rejected and when you are criticized, the only way out of that, isn’t to continue to reject yourself and subject yourself to criticism and rejection. It is to love yourself enough to stop that inner critic or the outer critic, and love it into submission.

Let’s go to another way we get confused about love as we dive a little bit deeper into this concept.

Another way that we confuse love for pain is when we experience abandonment. This could take many forms, but I’ll tell you how it gets confused most often is when a parent is abandoning, they leave, they go MIA.  They’re here one day, gone the next.  They’re available to you and then unavailable to you. They say to you as a reason of why this happened, “well it’s because I loved you that I went away.  I wanted to protect you.
You weren’t strong enough to stay away from me, so I had to stay away from you because I was messed up  I needed to leave you.”

Now this kind of rings true, right? We might say, “I can see how that was the kindest thing they could do was leave me.” However, it’s still abandonment. And the confusion comes in when we believe they left me because they love me. They go away because they love me. No.  People go away because they’re abandoners.  It has nothing to do with love. Love heals abandonment.  Love is not abandonment.

The only thing that heals that wound is consistent love.  We really must stop abandoning ourselves. We have to stick around for ourselves, but we abandon ourselves all the time. We start, but we don’t finish. We betray our inner wisdom and ignore red flags. We stay in relationships longer than we should. We stay with people who love us one minute and hate us the next, who are here one minute and gone the next, because then we believe, “well, love is like that.” Love is not like that.  Love heals that.

Another way we get confused about love is when we experience neglect.

An example of this is growing up in a household with one sick sibling or troubled sibling. The parent puts all their love and attention into that person. Or the parent is sick themselves. So all their attention and time goes to healing their own wounds and working on themselves. That’s a wonderful thing.  They’re healing, but they do it at the expense of the kid. The logic that they tell the kid is, “well, you know, you didn’t need me so much. You’re so strong. You’re so amazing. I knew you always had it. All the attention went to your sibling because you’ve got it like that. You just didn’t need me. You know, I love you, but you’re so strong. You were fine.”

So, the message gets taught, “They weren’t there for me because they loved me and believed in me.” We get confused and we get into relationships where we don’t know how to ask for our own needs because we learned love is meeting the needs of everybody else except yourself, and we get confused. Then we come to believe love is self-sacrifice. It’s not.  Love heals neglect.

We also believe love is pain is when we suffer betrayal.

We can believe love is love hurts because betrayal hurts. You might have grown up in a family where you were expected to keep secrets.  You were taught and told, we keep secrets in the house because we love each other, and that’s what we do. Some of you are in a relationship with an alcoholic or an addict, but you’re not telling anybody because “we keep secrets, and love is keeping secrets.” But you can’t love somebody and kill them at the same time and that’s what keeping secrets does. Maybe as a child, you heard the story of, “I cheated on your father because I was so passionate about this romance and love wants what it wants, and I couldn’t help it”. So you learned love is cheating.

The last way we confuse love and pain is when we believe that love includes being violated. 

Usually this comes in the form of boundaries.

You’re a kid. You need your space. You’re in your room and you just need time to be angry and vent.  The parent comes in and bulldozes in the room and doesn’t give you any space and you’re not allowed to have any boundaries. Your boundaries are constantly violated. Your physical space is violated. Your emotional space is violated. Your psychological space is violated.  You have no space for yourself. And the parent says, “It’s because I love you that I force my way. I love you enough to fight you. And I love you enough to ignore what you’re asking because I know better.” You are confused because you start to believe, “Well, I guess if you really love me, you do cross my boundaries.” And then you become an adult and you start to look for relationships where people cross your boundaries, and you think that’s love. You rationalize, “he doesn’t really love me if he’s not beating down your door.

These are the sick games we start to play in relationships when we believe lies about love.

And the most insidious lie we believe is that love hurts.

How do we undo it? We’ve talked about where it came from. We’ve talked about what it is. And now we want to talk about how to move forward. You’ve done step one, which is looking at yourself and seeing where this lie lives in you, and then step two is to get to work. It’s time to put that awareness in motion. It’s let me come alongside of you so that I can help you unpack this and install a new truth inside of you.

We must be willing to look at how this lie shows up in your life. And then from that space, we move to systematically remove this lie person by person, behavior by behavior, piece by piece, and still install new truth.
I look forward to helping you on that journey. I would love to come alongside of you on your healing journey. You deserve love.  Love is what life is about. You can have everything else, but at the end of the day, if you have a relationship that’s not functioning, it’s full of betrayal, rejection, abandonment and neglect, you will ask yourself what’s the point?

The point is love. And the point is for you to experience that radical love, that all-encompassing safe space, where you can be yourself.  You deserve a relationship where you can be all of you, and be loved and accepted and seen, and understood and valued. You deserve to be cherished and treasured for all that you are and all that you aren’t too.

When you’re ready to go deeper, go to HeidiRain.com and we can schedule a complimentary consultation and learn about all the ways that I can support you on your healing journey. I look forward to that and as always, of course, take excellent care of you.