More About the Pain of Being Loved...

Dave asked, "How could we fear a love that places no conditions on us--an unconditional love?"

I counter with, "How can we not fear such love?"

The purity of that kind of love is not something we encounter in our relationships with other human beings. It is only available to us through the Father, the Son, the Spirit. The wonderful, powerful, awesome thing that it is - truly it ought to inspire fear in us all.

Dave also asked, "Are you saying that it is these possibilities that we fear or are anxious about--these possibilities of love? Is it the agenda of others that we fear (the expectations and demands), or the fact that they can see potential in us that we cannot see?"

And to this I can only say, "No, I don't think any of that is quite right."

We must stop thinking of this in psychological terms, if we are to understand it. This is not rational fear when it becomes damaging to our ability to form relationships. Rational fear is the fear we have of being hit by a car, or of the power of God, or of strangers. Irrational fear is the unreasonable terror some of us feel when we are confronted with the fact that God loves us, or, almost as bad, that other people actually care about us.

Let's bring this into the specific, because the abstract isn't going to clarify things at all.

Fear
Afraid to be me
Afraid to be self
Afraid of others
Afraid

I can’t let anyone in, can’t let anyone see who I really am.
I give them what they want, give them who they want, and they go away pleased.
But I’m hurting inside, I’m crying inside, I’m yearning to be set free.

I’m afraid of freedom.

I’m afraid to let myself be my self, even here, in my writing, where nobody else will see.
So I search out those who are their own selfs, and I let them touch my self.
But I can’t get too close, mustn’t touch the burner when it’s on, don’t want to get burned.
Fear pushes them away.

I’m pulling others in with one hand and pushing them away with the other.

It’s a very lonely space to be in, but I can’t find the way out.

And when I find someone like me, who is a lot of masks over the real self,
I think I have found my kin, and I ruin what could have been
By placing my expectations of samenes
When what I myself need is no expectations, no thanks, no compliments, no nothing
Just permission to be

And then maybe I can stop being so afraid

copyright Janna Hoskin - 12/28/99

I once thought that this poem, and the short essay that goes with it, explained my problems with coming close to God and to others. Now, I'm not so sure.

You see, I'm not afraid that others won't like me anymore if I let them see me as I truly am. I honestly could not care less if other people like the real me. I am who I am, and if you choose not to spend time with me, then you'll be missing out on something.

But those same problems continue to crop up, and beneath them is this current of fear - fear of others, fear of self, fear of sameness, fear of love.

When I went to Cursillo, there was a sense of disconnect, of emotional stagnation, of shutdown... but that happened only on and during the Day of Love. Dissociation is not uncommon for me. I do it with alarming regularity, especially when I'm in any kind of relationship that resembles a romantic association. However hard I try, I cannot remain fully present in the moment. I remove myself, emotionally and intellectually, from situations involving physical intimacy. I distance myself from the possibility of reciprocity within the framework of relationship.

I acknowledge that I respond to such things as though I were a victim of abuse. But I was not abused as a child, and I have had these responses for as long as I can remember.

This is what causes me to wonder if, perhaps, some of us were born with this inability to accept love... perhaps born with an extreme sensitivity, or "allergy" to being loved by others.

Many autistic writers have shared their inability to use more than one sense at a time. They can listen or make eye contact; they can talk or be touched; they can smell or taste. I wonder if part of what I am writing about here is similar to this autistic trait. I wonder if perhaps the inability to accept the love of others is also similar to this autistic trait.

But I cannot find my way past the conviction that I was, in fact, born with this spirit of fear within me. I have wondered, in the past, if it might be possible that a demon was assigned to me at my birth (at my conception?), and that his assignment is to keep me from fulfilling my Calling.

I begin to be convinced that this is so. If I am correct, I would not be surprised to learn that my inability to accept God's love is rooted in the barriers that this demon has placed in my life. It would not be shocking to discover that I am "stalled" because of demonic barriers.

(Do note that I do not consider my ADHD to be one of these demonic barriers. Rather, it is a gift of God to be cherished and worked with. The things of which I here write are not a result of having ADHD.)