I know a guy who is so frustrated he can’t see straight. He just wants to be loved! He wants to feel unconditional love from his wife, his family, the world, God; but it just seems to keep slipping through his fingers. In desperation, he has tried multiple other options in an effort to get his love tank filled, but he keeps coming back empty. How is this guy to get loved unconditionally? He just can’t seem to find the right thing to fill his tank so that he can feel loved!
I suggest that perhaps the problem is not the quality or quantity of what is being deposited into his love tank, but it is the quality of the love tank itself! Dude’s got a hole in his tank and he doesn’t know it. . .
The only way to get true unconditional love is to learn how to give it to yourself. Hear that? No other person can heal the wounds from your childhood except for you! If you don’t see yourself as worthy of love, then your love tank cannot even hold onto what love the world does give you! You are a sieve – any love that goes into the tank, immediately drains right back out the bottom and you are ready for more. So as long as the focus is on the tank filler and not the tank, you will keep feeling empty and unloved. Let me rephrase that – as long as you keep believing that your partner, or alcohol, or sex, or food, or beauty, or success, or material possessions or (insert your focus here) can fill the tank, you will remain unsatisfied. As long as your focus remains on what you believe can, or will, or might, or should fill your tank, you will keep chasing your tail and falling short of your goal! I have seen this process absolutely destroy good people. If only they could have had the wisdom to take the focus off of what was going into the tank and inspect the tank!! It is sad, but I understand that it is much easier to hold the belief that someone else should fill it then to fix it. And as long as the people around you also buy into the belief that they can fill your tank, you will never see the hole in your tank and the hole will never get fixed.
So how do you love yourself unconditionally? The very first word that comes to mind is acceptance. Accept yourself as you are: who you are, what you’ve become, the good, the bad, the
ugly, the sweet, the talents, the demons, the brokenness, the truths, the lies, the good works, the secrets, the successes, the failures, the good intentions, the painkilling, the righteous, the pitiful – you get the idea. We simply MUST look at the whole entire picture – see that as who we are, and then – hold on to your seat – we have to learn how to love it. Sound impossible? If the answer to that question is “Yes”, then that is exactly where to start patching your tank!
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