Joe argues that your capacity to feel and accept love is heavily governed by your sense of safety — you can only let in as much love as your system can tolerate feeling safe. This sounds backwards: of course we all want to feel safe. But for many people safety itself has been wired to danger. You felt safe, and then the other shoe dropped, so deep safety now registers as the prelude to something bad.
“Your capacity to feel and accept love is very heavily based on your sense of safety.”
There’s a related identity trap. If adoration exceeds how you see yourself, it becomes physically uncomfortable and you reject it — visible in how hard it is to receive a compliment, which dissolves the ego by forcing you to see yourself differently. Confirmation bias compounds this: you notice the one way you’re not loved far faster than the twenty ways you are. A partner can do twenty things right and you fixate on the one thing they didn’t do. So love gets pushed away not by lack of love but by a nervous system and an identity that can’t yet hold it.
“You start seeing how you’re not loved a lot quicker than you see how you are loved.”
Related Concepts
- Safety in teams is tuned like a guitar string, not maximized
- Whatever was wired with love feels like love, even when it isn’t
- Pleasure signals safety to the nervous system
- Welcoming all emotions is what makes sustained love possible
- Self-compassion is the meta-variable that speeds all transformation
- Love dissolves identity, which is why it’s frightening
- Longing and loneliness are love in disguise
- The expansiveness underneath resistance to love is overwhelming and amazing
- Love requires willingness to be hurt