Unconditional Love

Love is a tricky emotion to navigate for most people. In part, I think that’s because the word is supposed to fulfill so many different roles. That’s a lot of pressure for four little letters.

Defining Love

Think about all the ways it’s used for a minute. The way you love your parents, grandparents, Sunday school teachers, teachers, students, children, pets, friends, lovers, family, chosen family, spouse, significant other, ex-significant others, childhood friends, coworkers, favorite meals, maple sugar, specific geographic locations, your bed, a rainstorm, the beach at night, songs, characters in a book or movie, Disney World, and random people you just met but feel that instant lifelong connection for when you play truth or dare in a crowded online room filled with complete strangers. Just me? Ok. But my point is still valid.

You love in so many different ways but only have one word with which to express the myriad of emotions.

And that can make knowing how to talk about the word challenging. Especially when every single person you love has a different understanding of what it means and experiences it in a different way.

That’s why today, and every time I ever talk about anything ever, I’m going to be pretty specific so we’re all on the same page.

Today I want to talk about unconditional love with people. We’ll save discussions of food, places, music, and other fun things for some other time.

The reason love can feel so many different ways is actually very simple. Different types of feelings we label as love are created by the very different thoughts we have about the various people in our lives. For example, I bet the thoughts you have about your grandparents are very different than the ones you have about any romantic relationship in your life.

That’s an obvious one, right? 

But what about people for whom we think we should have similar types of love feelings, parents, for example. Parental love should totally feel the same for everyone? Ok maybe not everyone, but for sure our love for our parents should feel the same. Right? Maybe for you, but I’ve never met anyone that was true for. That’s because love isn’t a static emotion, it’s an embodied feeling derived from the thoughts you have about someone. 

Yes, I’m really saying the way you feel about someone isn’t organic and out of your control - and it IS all in your head. But that isn’t a bad thing. It doesn’t make it less real or the emotional connection less valid. It just means that if you’re like literally every other human on the planet, you’ve experienced love as being something that just happens and you haven’t consciously connected it to the thoughts you’re having about the person. The truth is you don’t “fall” into and out of love. Your thoughts change. But because most people aren’t actively aware of their thoughts or even remotely trying to manage their minds, it can subjectively feel a lot like falling - sudden and out of your control. 

The good news is, it’s not out of your control.

I’m also saying that the way you feel about someone has nothing at all to do with them, their thoughts, their actions, or how they feel about you. It’s all about what you think about them, what you think their thoughts are, what you think about their actions, and what you think about how you think they feel about you. Mind. Blown. 

Wait. It gets trippier. The way someone else feels about you has legit nothing to do with you for the exact same reasons. That’s why you can’t make someone else fall in love with you and why you can’t make them feel loved by you. People are only able to experience and receive the love they are able to think and all of the loving thoughts in the world on your part won’t change a thing at all for them or their experience. In fact, you’re not responsible for any of their feelings - they are.

For realsies though, all of that blows my mind every time I come back to this realization.

Side note. I frequently have to remind myself of all these things even though I understand them at an intellectual level. That’s why I get weekly coaching and why I do thoughtwork daily. Managing the wild animal that is the human brain is challenging and requires next-level dedication.

Alright so. Love is in your head, not some mythical heart area located wherever you feel the feels. And it’s still real, and it’s still amazing, and it’s still all of the things.

It’s ok if you think I’m a little daft, I can prove your thoughts create your feelings all day every day, and in lots of different ways.

At some point in your life, you were madly head over heels in love with someone, right? And then it ended because while love may be infinite and unconditional, relationships are often finite and tend to have a terms and conditions section that would make your eyes bleed if you ever saw them all written out.

Marriages that end in divorce illustrate this really well a lot of times because of how bitter and ugly and ridiculous a divorce can be. This person that you loved so much that you were willing to take vows and sign legal contracts to keep in your life is suddenly the enemy commanding a legal team that’s locked in battle with your legal army over who gets what and how much because at some point someone did….

You thought I was going to go off into a list of all the subjectively horrible things that can split up a couple, right? Like abuse or infidelity or not putting clothes in the hamper but that’s never the case. Some people enjoy what is defined as abuse by other people and think open marriages with lots of bonus partners is ideal and care not even a tiny bit where the clothes end up at the end of the day. It’s never the circumstances that end a marriage, it’s always the thoughts of the two individuals. 

That legal battle between former lovers who are dissolving their marriage is just because they stopped thinking the thoughts they started with and started thinking new ones. 

Don’t take this to mean that I think you should think thoughts that’ll keep you married. I don’t. I think you should think whatever you want to think to get whatever result you want to get - as long as you’re doing it intentionally.

My point is simply that it is a thought (or a long list of thoughts) that led to the result, not some mysterious fall that landed you out of love or a circumstance that pushed you over the cliff the led to a freefall of despair and a rough landing on broken glass.

Love is the feeling you get when you think thoughts that make you experience love. That’s it. She gets me. He makes me feel safe. She’s sexy. He’s smart. She is easy to talk to. He really listens to me. Those are thoughts that are going to make you feel loved.

If you’re thinking she doesn’t understand me, I can’t trust him, she never wants sex, his opinions are stupid, she doesn’t talk to me, he doesn’t listen to me - those are the thoughts that are going to create a feeling of falling out of love. 

Neither set of thoughts is more or less true. Barring alien abduction that included a personality transplant, brain tumor, demonic possession, or some sort of psychiatric condition, the person you fell in love with hasn’t fundamentally changed into a new person that you fell out of love with.  It’s almost always that our thoughts about them and their actions changed. 

That’s why people often say the thing they fell in love with is the thing that ends up driving them apart. For example, if you have a partner who is driven in his or her career and they work long hours out of love for the job or to move ahead, you might think that is an admirable quality and create feelings of love about it in the beginning but later think they aren’t spending enough time with you and create feelings of neglect. The action didn’t change - just the thought about the action. 

But that doesn’t mean your thoughts need to stay the same or that you what you want shouldn’t change. 

Ok, but what if their actions DO change? Or what if my thoughts about their actions change and I like my reasons and I don’t want to be with them anymore. Then they for sure must be the enemy and I have to hate them. Right? Nope.  

Unconditional Love + Boundaries

So back to parents. 

As I’m recording this podcast, it is the birthday of both my mother and father who were born two years apart. Both are gone now, but I still think about them on a semi-regular basis and they’ll be great examples for a lot of reasons. 

I’m going to focus mostly on my mother who was my main parental figure after my parents divorced. My father was an alcoholic and I spent very little time with him before I turned eighteen when he stopped drinking. 

I loved my mother so much as a child, as children do. I had no idea that a lot of my childhood was abnormal or that there was a lot of abuse. It’s impossible to know that as a child, really, and it’s why children who are abused often hide the fact or defend the abuser. I’m going to skip the details because they don’t really matter. What matters is that I always loved her even when I didn’t like her very much as an adult.

It wasn’t until I became pregnant with my first child that I realized that unconditional love can also have boundaries. You see, my mother wasn’t a bad person, because bad is, of course, subjective, but she was mentally unstable. When I thought about her being around my child, it rapidly became clear that was not an acceptable option. I still loved her and I wanted her to be happy but I also wanted what was best for my child and me as a parent. Unfortunately, the two of those weren’t the same thing - and all the people in my life had a LOT of thoughts about me and my decision. 

Just because I loved her and I desperately wished my children could have the experience of having a grandmother that was similar to my own, that didn’t outweigh the danger she presented. Just because it made her sad and she made sure everyone knew how she felt betrayed and hurt and victimized by the decision, didn’t make her feelings or desires more valid or important than my own. I continued to love her unconditionally but with boundaries. Those boundaries meant we only spoke and I only saw her a handful of times before she died seven years later. 

I never hated her because my thoughts were never thoughts that create a feeling of hate. I loved her because instead of focusing on the subjectively hurtful things she said or abusive things she did, my main focus was that she was doing the best she could. But the best she could do simply wasn’t sufficient to ensure the safety of those I was responsible for.  

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not all sunshine and butterflies. I’m more like sunshine mixed with a little hurricane and there were times I’d get angry at something she’d do or say or I’d spin out and be upset and depressed because I have a human brain and I didn’t have the language that thoughtwork, stoicism, and astrology have given me.

It’s powerful to really understand that you can still love someone and remove them from your life. You don’t have to do it from a place of hate. A lot of the animosity people experience in their relationships with the past is from choosing thoughts that facilitate those feelings. But when you recognize it is a choice and that your choice doesn’t imply approval for actions taken in the past or require you to interact differently in the present, it’s truly a gift. That’s the power of unconditional love with boundaries.

Unconditional Love is for You

The point of loving unconditionally isn’t about someone else. It’s not to make it “easier” to deal with a bad situation or to trap you in a relationship that you don’t want to be in.

The point is your experience of this brief moment of existence. You get to choose how you experience the people you interact with and especially those you have close relationships with. You even get to choose how you experience them when the relationship ends or when it changes in subjectively negative ways.

Unconditional love is for you.

When you choose thoughts that allow you to feel love regardless, your quality of life subjectively improves. People think they enjoy feeling angry or righteous or hurt because it allows them to break free of something. But the truth is you can create the same results from a place of love - and that just feels a whole lot better. So why wouldn’t you? 

But unconditional love is for you in another way too. When you begin to love other people unconditionally, it becomes a whole lot easier to learn to love yourself in the same way. When you recognize that the thoughts you are having about someone are creating your feelings, then those feelings you have of not being good enough or worthy or smart enough or pretty enough or any of the things become easier to recognize as thoughts and not just facts that your brain is reporting like the daily weather.

Unconditional Love’s Superpower

Even though loving unconditionally is for you, it has a hidden superpower. When you take ownership for the way you feel, it takes the burden off of those around you to change their actions in order to “make” you feel a certain way about them. When they feel secure that you will manage your mind and your love will be there for them regardless of what they say or how honest they are or how they do or don’t pretend to feel or be, then you get the gift of finding out who they really are. 

You don’t get the watered-down version of who they think they should be. And when you love yourself unconditionally, you don’t give them a muted version of yourself. And that’s a whole other level of love.

Anyone who has ever had my love still has it. They may not be in my life anymore but it isn’t because I don’t love them or they did something wrong. It’s because what we wanted or were interested in became different. I want them to be as fully them as they can be while also being as me as I can be and with unconditional love, those two realities can coexist for me even if we aren’t together.

That’s a pretty great superpower.

So tell me... 

Who does it feel impossible to love and have boundaries with? What are you thinking that makes you feel that way? Who is it easier to rage against than to deal with from a place of love and what thoughts are leading you to that conclusion? How would your life be different if you could make all of the empowered decisions you want from a place of love? How would your experience of other people be different if you consistently practiced thoughts that let you feel unconditional love for them and for yourself?

If you’re feeling frisky, hit me up on Instagram and share your answer with me.

Until next time, my wish for you are the thoughts that will give you the feeling of unconditional love for yourself and for all of the people in your life.

Podcast Theme Music

License:  Rustic Ballad by Alexander Nakarada