Have you ever tried to love someone, but you could feel their emotional walls? You can feel them not letting you in. You can feel the little person trapped inside. Or have you ever felt somebody trying to get to you, but you can feel yourself stopping it? This is how most of us experience relationships. This is what the emotional baggage from our past that we carry.
Sometimes we have so many walls that we can't feel much of anything at all. We can't feel passion. We can't feel excitement. And of course, we can't have real moments. Those walls don't just separate you from other people. They separate you from yourself, making loving and liking yourself very difficult. That source of power and love and passion inside of you, your inner child, is in an emotional prison.
How do we break down those walls? The emotions that you feel and express, you can heal. You can't heal feelings that you stuff inside you. But all those old emotions, and all that old energy, need to come out. I call it unfinished emotional business. We need to actually go back in there, say the things we never said, cry the tears we never cried, get angry about the things we never got angry about, so that we don't need to protect ourselves with those walls any more.
Second, we need to let new love in. The irony about emotional walls is that new love heals old pain. It was from not being loved enough that we built the walls in the first place. So the only thing that can really heal that feeling is new love.
What I'm saying is this. Finding your ability to feel again is the first step toward creating true intimacy with your partner and experiencing real moments in your relationship. To do this, you need to defrost the ice around your heart, to work on healing those emotional wounds, because the more you do, the easier it will be for you to love.
Do some work on healing your unfinished emotional business and allowing the love that's inside you to come out, so you can share it with your partner and create the real moments you deserve.
The kind of intimacy I'm talking about isn't something that happens automatically. Great love requires great courage. It asks you to push past the fears that would keep you protected and invulnerable to your partner, and instead to reveal your most secret hiding place and your most unguarded doorways. Great love demands that you invite your beloved in past the walls, and allow him or her to know all of you — the strength and the despair, the vision and the terror, the confident adult and the lonely child.
And great love insists on showing you every place in your being that is selfish and strong-willed, every shadow in your heart that's not loving or compassionate. Your partner is your teacher, reflecting these things back to you so that you see all the ways you need to grow as a lover.
But the reward is truly magnificent, because when you love deeply, courageously and with commitment, your relationship will be filled with sacred, joy-filled, real moments.
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Easy Does it..Keep It Simple..Let Go and Let God..
Wow! Absolutely awesome post and a subject I was thinking about this morning reading posts over on my side (Al-Anon). Could you please copy and post this over there for us?
I know before I came to Al-Anon I was one of those who had tried putting up a wall around my heart to try and avoid the pain. My heart was getting further and further away from hubby, due to this wall, and while it may have seemed like I was protecting myself from heartache, I really wasn't, because I still felt it. I felt the pain, but wasn't feeling the love because I was locking it away inside. This made both myself and hubby miserable. After being in Al-Anon for some time, I finally got the meaning of detachment with love. I didn't need that wall anymore. As I began tearing my wall down and applying the Al-Anon principles and tools in my life, I noticed changes not only in me, but in hubby too. For me, the changes in him are just an added benefit to my own recovery. He still drinks, but we are able to talk "program talk" and I think this has helped him to look at some issues from his past in a new way and resolve some of them. (He had 7 years in AA before his divorce from the ex, which is when he relapsed.)
I am truly grateful to these programs. They have benefited my life and the life of my family so much. I see my 20 year old stepdaughter picking up the Al-Anon literature and working on her own behaviors and understanding of the disease. Our home has gone from almost constant yelling and unhappiness to one of calm discussion and trying to work together as a team.
I used to sit here at my computer and hum "What's love got to do with it" while listening to discussions of how "love alone won't cure the alcoholic". Yes, true, they have to want recovery for themself. But ya know, my being a "shrew" only fed the disease (in both of us), and once I rediscovered my love and applied it, that's when I began seeing changes. Fear of being hurt only causes more pain, in my humble opinion. I guess the last paragraph of your post sums it up best....
But the reward is truly magnificent, because when you love deeply, courageously and with commitment, your relationship will be filled with sacred, joy-filled, real moments.
