How to determine if I love someone 2

Hi coaches, thank you so much for your input!
I did a thought download on what I think love means and realized that there are a lot of extremes. It is unconditional. All doubt is erased. If you truly love a person, you love everything about them. You never get annoyed. There is no uncertainty. You don’t need your own space. You agree on everything. Reading through this it becomes clear to me that this most certainly is not what love is about. That sounds unrealistic even to me. However, I feel like some degree of these extremes must be there, at least in the initial “in love” phase. What comes up for me next is a self-love issue. I wrote down the following paragraph:

“When people get too close to me, I feel threatened. I feel like they make me small and I am insignificant next to them. I act unreasonably and irrational. I start a conflict where there is none. I cannot be proud of their achievements, goals and ambitions because I feel inferior. I lash out at them because I feel threatened. I am scared that I get lost, hurt and left alone in the process of them getting closer to me.”

This happens in friendships as well as relationships. I feel like love cannot thrive as long as I have these thoughts (and the reactions connected to them – thank you so much for recommending the Somatics webinar, I feel like that will help a lot!).
Moreover, I assume I have to love the other person as they love me. My boyfriend definitely makes me believe love for him feels like many of the superlatives in my initial thoughts. He trusts me in every issue, he loves me through every tantrum I have, he is certain about a future together. He tells me I am the most important person in his life. Exploring this statement further for me that leads to two things. 1. I feel like I am not good enough to be the most important person in anyone’s life. 2. I want myself to be the most important person in my life. I don’t even want him to be the most important person in my life. Does that mean he loves me more than I love him and I don’t love him enough?

I’d like to explore the option of making myself the priority in my life and focusing on self-love and my self-esteem. I wonder if I then would be able to put more trust in my boyfriend and get closer to being aware of my love for him (the love he clearly sees in my actions, reactions and physical attachment but that is difficult to grasp for me). At the moment, my thoughts around how much I love him vary with my mood. Sometimes I even realize I am lying to him when I tell him I love him (I catch myself looking away to the left – I always do that when lying). There is also a big chunk of fear of finding out I might not love my boyfriend at all involved when exploring what love is for me.

I am thankful for any questions, thoughts and prompts to explore this further and help me to solve my doubt, pressure and fear around love!

 

 

Answer:

What wonderful insights you’ve found! Have you put some of these thoughts into models? We recommend choosing a specific circumstance that has happened in the last while and doing a thought download on it and hten doing some models. For example, when was the last time your eyes went to the left when you said “I love you?” What was that all about?

What’s the worst that would happen if you found out you don’t actually love your boyfriend? Let your mind go there. Instead of being afraid of the unknown, face it head on.  What are you most afraid of feeling?

It sounds like you have a great plan to prioritize yourself. What does that look like for you? What are your beliefs around prioritizing yourself? See what you find and bring back anything you want o more coaching on, or your models.