god forbade...must reading

Longing

    Longing has been given a terrible rap. We've been told that it's both unhealthy and unattractive, that we have to be content on our own before we can find a healthy love. Longing can be our greatest ally in finding and keeping love. There's no question that longing hurts. Longing for an unavailable person is not a place we want to stay in. Yet longing is a central part of our human experience. The closer we get to our deepest feelings, the more we feel the pain of love's absence.

    When love is missing, our loneliness tells us it's missing. When our life is empty, our longing tells us it's empty. When we learn to treasure our longing, it deepens an enduring dimension. Our longing has the power to make us fight for what we want--including fighting against our own habits of isolation.

         in general, the depth of our longing determines the leverage we have in overturning the patterns that block us from love.

     When longing burns in us, we change, because we must. When we ask for what we most want, using the inner language of our personal yearning, we generate heat, emotion, and longing.

     We may begin to dread that love will never come. We may fear that we don't deserve our heart's desire. Or we might sharply feel the pain of our passionate unmet need for partnership and family. These are hard things to tolerate.

      The reason that human beings don't attract the kind of love we want and need is because we haven't loved a part of ourselves. The unloved part of ourselves does the attracting unconsciously until we learn to love it in ourselves. Only then we can attract what we consciously really want.

     Up until then our love life is being run by our old unconscious programming that may have been dipped in a bath of abandonment, divorce and conflict. The unconscious aspects of whatever you got bathed in while growing up start attracting people into your life that fit this matrix.

     If you can open up and really accept and love the previously unacceptable and unlovable parts of yourself, then suddenly you don't have to keep attracting things that trigger those mechanisms from the outside world.

Ken Page, LCSW

in Finding Love

Psychology Today