No matter which walks of life you are from, we all, as a collective, share the same deepest yearnings. To know and to be known, to hold and be held, to love and be loved, to experience real connection without walls and express love without censors. And yet, when real love is staring you in the eyes, you may notice a disconcerting urge to withdraw. Love can be a frightening path, and if you remain committed to the journey of love, within its dark paths are fragments of yourself that you’ve never met before. Some of these fragments can be a shocking revelation to you and shake every painful memory you hold on to, you may find yourself questioning the reality you made out of those experiences.

Most of us have experienced abandonment in some way. Very few can truly embrace love when it comes. Most of us, somewhere along the chapters of our abandonment, decided ‘this will never happen to me again’. And subconsciously, a whole machinery is created within our minds that is designed to protect our own heart from falling into the unknown depths of love with another.

Think about it, how many times have you fallen in love, where the initial phase was like a vintage romantic tale and the language of the free heart was the only one spoken? But then there comes a time where the other, is witnessing parts of you that have never been attended to, even by your own heart. This form of intimacy, where you have your vulnerabilities received can result in disruption of your comfort. You are now forced to speak the language of truth, the language of responsibility, the language of intimacy you’ve never known. The language of safety you’ve never known. Now this can be a deeply frightening experience if you never developed a language of safety around these vulnerabilities; what plays out is the beginning of defence, the beginning of walls being put up and the beginning of withdrawing from this intimacy.

What one must explore as they find themselves in a chaotic mind when faced with deep intimacy from a lover, is ‘what is my core belief here’. The one core belief I have personally faced recently is:

‘If I love someone, they will leave me’

Breaking this down looks like:

‘It’s dangerous to deeply love someone. I am opening my heart just to get hurt, I have to deserve love’

Without realising it, the machinery you develop from this core belief equates to you leaving relationships prematurely. The fear of rejection is so high, you pre-emptively abandon others first.

Pre-emptively abandoning others can be done from both a conscious and unconscious level. If you are doing it from a conscious level, there is part of you that has surrendered to accepting this belief, and so behaviours are given more thought leading to more planned events that may be less turbulent around it. If you are doing it from an unconscious level, you have no idea this belief is driving you to behave in certain ways, and because you do not understand it yourself, the behaviours events from this can become extremely turbulent and toxic.

When you have no idea this core belief is driving your relationship views, your hidden self remains hidden, even from you, and it does this by creating scenarios around you leading you to believe that it is in fact you that is being abandoned. This can play out through criticism, noticing things around you to confirm your core belief, continuously making a case for the rightness of your belief, even when these beliefs are detrimental to your happiness and well-being.

Why is it important to uncover our core beliefs?

If you find yourself stuck in a pattern that you keep repeating, then very likely you have a core belief running your mind, and this can take a long while to uncover. Core beliefs are inner walls that have no doors and restrict us from experiencing new possibilities in life. This is why, in order to experience these new possibilities, the whole core belief in itself must be changed. To do this, the connection between the core belief itself and the feelings of anxiety you feel today must be made, to truly understand the cognitive dissonance of it.

It is time to stop rejecting the divinity of our hearts and truly explore the capabilities, the depths and the mysteries of our hearts in loving another.

This post has is dedicated to the one who has reached in to the depths of my heart and shown me the mirror to uncover my core belief.