The fifth reason we push away love is that love is a positive emotion, and positive emotions can be harder to welcome than negative ones. When love arrives, everything that has gone unloved rises up to meet it. Joe’s image is precise: love is a light shined into a dark ocean, and all the unloved creatures swim toward the surface to be loved.
“Love is like a light shined into a dark ocean and all the things that are unloved come up to the surface to be loved.”
So you’re loving, and suddenly you’re angry — because the anger is now being loved too. If you can’t tolerate feeling that anger, fear, and sadness, the love evaporates fast, and you grow scared to love again. This is why the negative emotions usually have to be welcomed first. Loving the inevitable “other shoe” — the anger that follows — means the shoe can’t shock you anymore, and the love can stay. The practical handle is emotional inquiry: welcoming each emotion builds the capacity that lets love last longer than the usual minute or two.
“If you’re not good with feeling all that other stuff, then the love goes away quickly and you get scared to love again.”
Related Concepts
- Suppressing one emotion suppresses them all
- Emotional inquiry is embodied exploration, not intellectual analysis
- Love dissolves identity, which is why it’s frightening
- Accepting love requires a nervous system that can tolerate safety
- Self-compassion is the meta-variable that speeds all transformation
- When love arrived with abuse, love later gets met with aggression
- Loving something to make it go away stops working
- We push away love by chasing it, avoiding it, or fighting