We don’t think about it much. We may go about our lives simply trying to survive. Day in and day out we are faced with threats surrounding us. You may be thinking: “How do I survive today?” Whether you are living from pay-check to pay-check, you are living each day wondering where you’ll get money for your next meal, or you may even feel you have it all but each day is a constant struggle to simply get out of bed and you have no idea why?
We may be thinking, “I just want to be happy”. What is happiness? What is love? Why do I have a need to be loved, a need to belong?
According to Abraham Maslow, we all have needs and this is what makes us human. What we may not realize, is that these “needs” also makes us vulnerable.
We may have gotten trapped in an unhealthy relationship as we tried to satisfy the need for Love and Belonging.
We may have ended with the wrong set of friends or co-workers. We may have ended up choosing a belief system that did not work out for us. All these may have occurred as we tried to satisfy a basic “need”.
In order to be loved, we must also love ourselves and be able to show love. Love can be defined as, “a feeling of strong or constant affection for a person” (Merriam-Webster Dictionary, 2021). Consequentially, opening up ourselves to others is where we become vulnerable. Vulnerable to be hurt by others. Vulnerable to being betrayed. Vulnerable to being ridiculed. If you, like many of us, have gotten hurt or betrayed then you may have found the need to shut off and shut out anything that felt to you like “love”. You don’t want to be vulnerable anymore. You do not want to get hurt. However, shutting out this hurt also means shutting out all the good feelings you could have.
Before deciding to shut out we must get to know who we are a bit more. A healthy relationship is based on trust and being open, leaving you vulnerable.
The connection is important, but feeling worthy of that connection is even more important. According to Dr. Brene Brown, people who believe they were worthy of connection experienced greater connectedness. Therefore, before we think about who can love us let us boost our self-esteem and connect with our vulnerabilities.
