Why Love Hurts?

Why is love SO compelling and yet often SO painful?!  Why is it that something as wonderful as LOVE can also bring us to our knees?  Falling into love, falling out of love, hurting or being hurt by the people we love, or longing for love – why is it that can love can hurt so much? 

The first thing you have to do is learn.

A great place to start is with The Beatles.  Their story illuminates a couple of key conditions important to this week's quest.  Part of what made The Beatles such a huge hit early on was that they were distanced from their audience.  To this day you can experience a lot of John, Paul, George and Ringo in pictures, recordings, and movies, but you're extremely unlikely to meet them as a normal person.  Part of what made them so famous was that at the time there was a tide of people who just wanted to gush love and adoration.  These fans – mostly young women – could idealize, idolize and fantasize, literally ‘to their hearts content.'   There was no threat of rejection, no danger of ever meeting and being disappointed by the objects of their affection, only the profound hope in their hearts that love could be so perfect.  This is the first condition I want to point out: fans wanted to experience a perfect love they innately knew was possible.

Where did this tide of love the Fab Four tapped into come from?  Why weren't listeners so satisfied with the love in their own homes and communities that these party animals with instruments had little impact?  Well that's just it, something was lacking.  A significant number of people were ready to explode.  One clue comes from how they grow up.  Psychologists notice that the bonds created during childhood – the love bonds of early childhood especially – shape not just how we love the people that raise us but how we experience love for the rest of our lives.  This early programming becomes tacit, like sunglasses we forget we're wearing.  The more love, the thinner the glass, and vice versa.  It seems as though when the Beatles first hit it big in North America there were some thick shades ready to come off, like a reservoir of love dammed up and waiting for someone to release the gates.

THIS is why love hurts: because our hearts get dammed up or blocked. 

We feel both the pain of the block or the longing for an unblocked state where we can experience love more easily and effortlessly.  Such blocks are exceedingly normal.  I work with almost all of my clients in every session to clear stagnant blocks big and small.  Their existence is involved in every illness and injury, and clearing them is one of the first things I learned in my energy healing training.

You need love to be healthy and happy, and without it your health and happiness falter.  Why would love ever be stymied?  Surely it should be flowing as freely as the Beatles' fans hoped.  Well, as I established in the previous two updates, love hasn't been a top priority in our culture, but it's on its way up.  This rise is inevitable because just as the Beatlemaniacs pointed out, love is primal and innate.  It's like we're born with a crayon box, and over time learn to color only with some of the colors.  Inevitably, however, we will come in contact with someone or something ‘outside the box'.  It can be a neighbor, a lover, a song, a work of art, an incident, an asshole in traffic, etc., that reminds us of one or more of the ‘other' colors.  For instance, if you're painstakingly nice you may be reminded of your anger, or if you are stoic and cool you may be reminded of your vulnerability.  These experiences are alternately painfully uncomfortable and compellingly attractive.  What were the kids who came of age in 1960's America responding to in their post-war, Baby Boomer parents?  They were at a point where they could no longer deny the existence of the other colors like love, no matter how hard they tried.  Sooner or later we all have to.

The most difficult thing is, if your heart blocks pain for a long time it gets comfortable that way. 

This new comfort zone becomes a lens through which you view everything in your world.  We develop intricate personal habits to help us avoid opening up to the pain we hold in our hearts.  Entire families will skate around hidden pain.  These habits become so ingrained that in most cases they become who we think we are.  This makes it harder to love and be loved, to feel, find and recognize love.  We may go to great lengths to prove ourselves worthy of the love we want but don't feel.  The fear of getting hurt again can be so great that we will turn away from our hearts to feel as little love as possible.  We'll prefer it.  One especially glaring tragedy stands out here: the things that hurt us are usually part of our history and no longer happening right now – especially in this very moment – yet we continue to protect ourselves.  When the energy in your heart is blocked for long enough it starts to show up in your body as heart related illness and disease.  Anything from simple tightness in the chest all the way to heart attacks – yes, heart attacks, the leading cause of death in the United States – are rooted blocked heart energy.

This is what's happening when love hurts:  when we open our hearts to others in our relationships, everything – and I mean everything – that has been dammed up has a chance to flow out and be felt.

This can be sad, terrifying, depressing, destructive, and lonely but also liberating, empowering, exhilarating and life-affirming.  The truth is, as humans we're not able to limit the stuff we don't like and let loose the stuff we do.  When you tighten down on some of it, you clamp down on all of it.  When you open up the flow again whatever you were blocking will be right there waiting for you.  If you're still hurting from a past intimate relationship of any kind, it's going to come up in your next one, of any kind.  Did you have a rough time with your father growing up?  You're going to have to address it all again as a dad, as a wife, or in your relationship with me.  Did you experience the death of a parent early on?  You can expect to be avoiding that threat of loss in all of your current relationships.  There are as many stories as there are people on earth, many much more and much less dramatic than these.  A large part of my work as an energy healer is working with the roots of these stories so that my clients' energies can flow in a healthy way again.  This way they don't have to continue to re-experience old pain in their life-circumstances.

The good news is that love hurts because your amazing heart is always trying to call up a great pain you couldn't get past, so you can get past it. 

I've seen it time and time again.  Your heart is a brilliant, mad genius.  It can be hard to find long buried pain, but the heart is attracted to exactly the people and situations you need to bring up and work out whatever baggage you're carrying around until it's not a burden anymore.  You will address your history over and over until you're, literally, over it.  Trust your heart and learn to hear what it's saying.  Love is a higher organizing principle than your thinking mind.  The mind can only observe love, but never control it, and all attempts to do so will be met with frustration and a lessening of love itself, in other words, more pain.  In the long run, we all have to grow in love.

Therefore the second thing you can do is heal. 

 Visit this article "How to Heal a Hurting Heart" for more information on how to do this.