Unconditional Love
Unconditional Love (noun) : affection with no limits or conditions; complete love. unconditional love. (n.d.). Dictionary.com’s 21st Century Lexicon. Retrieved December 20, 2017 from Dictionary.com website http://www.dictionary.com/browse/unconditional-love
How many people in your life can you genuinely say you unconditionally love? How many unconditionally love you back? Maybe you’re not sure if you have even experienced unconditional love before…
Well, we can’t MAKE anyone else unconditionally love us, that wouldn’t be very unconditionally loving 😉 What we can do is make the decision to love others without conditions.
Claire’s Steps to become more unconditionally loving:
- Identify what it means to you to love unconditionally – notice how your animals (new puppy in my case!!) love you. Even if you get upset with them, tell them NO over and over, and put them in “time-outs”, the next time they see you they are just as excited to see you and give you as many, if not more, kisses. This is unconditional love. (Of course, if someone is abusive to you in any form I am not talking about them – these steps apply to those people in your life who you love and are important to you).
- Pick one person in your life who you want to love unconditionally. Just one to start 😉
- When this person does something that may upset you, OR does something that pleases you – love and accept them the same.
- Notice what this persons’ ‘getting’ and ‘protecting’ behaviors are in regards to giving and receiving love. I learned about these behaviors in the book Real Love by Greg Baer, M.D. ‘Getting’ behaviors include lying, acting like victims, clinging, etc. We use these behaviors to fill ourselves with imitation love to fill the void of insufficient real love. ‘Protecting’ behaviors include lying, attacking, acting like victims, and running. We use these behaviors to diminish our fears of accepting real love. These are the examples and definitions used in the Real Love book, I am not going to go into much more detail. If you would like to read the book for yourself, here is the link to the book on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Real-Love-Unconditional-Fulfilling-Relationships/dp/1592400477/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1513793464&sr=8-1&keywords=real+love+greg+baer
- Just notice what this person’s getting and protecting behaviors are, don’t criticize them for using them…
- & love them unconditionally – this doesn’t mean if someone is being clingy, lying, etc. to be with them 24/7, get sucked down by their energy, etc. etc. This means that you understand why they are acting how they are, you still love them for who they are, and you let them be them.
During the Holidays people always seem to be more kind to one another; but it shouldn’t take the holidays to inspire us to love one another! I challenge you to unconditionally love all of the people in your life – it not only helps aid in their healing, but in yours as well.
As always – the number one, and MOST IMPORTANT person to love unconditionally, in my opinion, is yourself first 🙂
Happy Holidays!
XO,
Claire
Poppie's Perspective 