5 Steps to Achieving a Lifestyle of Love
/5 Steps to Achieving a Lifestyle of Love
Photo by Priscilla Du Preez on Unsplash
Love is a human need. It is an emotion that we all strive for in our relationships with others and with ourselves. Yet, for many of us, it can feel elusive. We often struggle to find lasting love in our relationships or for ourselves as a result of early life experiences that caused deep emotional wounds. When these wounds never get the opportunity to heal, they persist in our subconscious mind, shaping our beliefs about ourselves, other people, and the world. Our subconscious drives our behaviour (and our relationships) until we bring the subconscious to our conscious mind.
The opposite of love is fear. Unhealed emotional wounds create persistent fears that prevent us from taking risks, trusting others, or trusting ourselves. Our behaviour, choices, and even our words reflect and feed our fears rather than what we truly desire… love. To achieve a lifestyle of love, we must heal our early emotional wounds and challenge ourselves to try new ways of being and be vulnerable with trusted others.
These five steps will help you to create a lifestyle of love.
# 1 Identify the Patterns – Look for the patterns in your emotions, thoughts and behaviour, and when you notice them, don’t ignore them. Treat them as clues to unlock your subconscious needs and desires. If you like to journal, that might be a good place to go back and look for patterns. Do you use the same word or phrase over and over, is a common theme coming up several times? Or, if you’re not into journaling, pay attention to the words and phrases you use in conversations. How you describe yourself is a good example. Another example might be certain triggers that evoke intense emotional reaction.
# 2 Explore the Origins – When you notice a pattern, pause and ask yourself, “What am I feeling?” And, “When have I felt this way before?” Think back as early as you can remember feeling that emotion. Try to identify what messages you received in that early experience? What did you take away from it? What beliefs did you have about the situation, yourself, others, or the world?
# 3 Challenge Your Thoughts – Once you have identified these patterns and the origins, you will start to recognize the connections between your current experiences and your past experiences more readily. In those moments, you will have to remind yourself that your current reaction is being amplified by those past experiences. Take a step back to remind yourself that you are not that “inner child,” you are an adult, you are safe, and you are in control of your life. Affirmations work very well at this step. But don’t stop there. Spend some time examining the evidence that supports your thought and the evidence that counters your thought. Once you’ve taken an honest look at all the evidence, you might recognize that this thought is either not true or not helpful. In either case, you might replace that notion with a more realistic one.
# 4 Experiment with New Ways of Being – Now you have to get outside your comfort zone. What is familiar may be comfortable, but it is not necessarily helping you achieve your true desires and goals. Stretching your comfort zone also improves self-esteem, or self-love, it teaches you that you can take on challenges and overcome them. So, this step is critical. “Everything you want is on the other side of fear,” so you must step into that fear. As you accomplish more challenging tasks or goals you are re-training your brain to become comfortable in the uncomfortable.
# 5 Seek Feedback from Trusted Others – We do not heal in isolation. In relationships we are more likely to be triggered but we are also more likely to have, what I call, a “corrective experience.” Without going through this process of bringing our subconscious to our conscious, we replay our early traumatic experiences over and over in an attempt to heal them. But, more often, we re-experience the event with the same outcome which only affirms our negative beliefs, making them stronger. So, we want to do this consciously, and in the right relationships, which is why I say, “trusted others.” If you do not have someone you trust in your life that you would be able to talk through some of these experiences with and have that “corrective experience,” talking to a therapist can really help. A corrective experience can effectively heal the trauma we’ve experienced in the past and challenge any unhelpful or false beliefs we’ve developed.
Creating a lifestyle of love isn’t an easy process. It is one that requires ongoing conscious effort to repeat these steps as often as needed. It can bring up a lot of unresolved emotional pain and may even feel like it is making things worse before it gets better. Yet, it can be hugely rewarding, allowing you to connect with yourself and others on a more intimate level than you’ve ever experienced and let love, not fear, guide your behaviour.