10 Lies We Think Are Love

Real love is an energy that supports us in feeling good. When we feel genuine self-love and self-worth, we experience ourselves as good and capable. A reverence and humility accompanies this deep knowing that we are valuable just for being ourselves. Our worth is not dependent on our doings or our belongings. When genuine self-love and self-worth is present, we attract love and respect from others.

We come into this world with the need to be validated as loveable. We are looking for someone, primarily our parents, to tell us that we are important, that we are loved and cherished, and that we count unconditionally. Even though our spirit knows that we are loveable, our cognitive selves need to hear it. We are looking to be validated all through our infancy, childhood, and teenage years as we move through developmental stages. If we were not given that message and our environment caused us to feel threatened, we may still be looking to have the message that we are loveable given to us as adults. We are stuck in patterns of codependency, looking for love and validation outside of ourselves.

When we were little and love was not as available or predictable, we learned to live without it. We subconsciously created ways of thinking and behaving that helped us feel safer in what seemed like a random world. You may have tried different things to get more love and to support you in feeling more loveable. Some of those ways worked, and to this day, you may subconsciously still believe that you need these patterns in order to be loveable.

The 10 Lies We Think Are Love

1. Food is love. Our bodies require love through appropriate touch. When that need has not been met, we often turn to food. The root cause of all addictions is the body's need for attention. Food feels good to the body. The body will begin to believe that food is love and will continually seek it out.
2. Sex is love. This belief supports people in fearing, hating, and despising sex or becoming addicted to it. If you were sexually abused or prematurely affected by sexual experiences, it is common to have the deeper belief that you can only be loved for sex. Sexual addictions are supported by the body's need for affection, and it has come through sexual encounters. Again, the body needs touch and support. If you were sexually abused as a child, your body may go through a cycle of feeling starved for love, getting a quick fix with sex, and then feeling bad for satisfying its need for love with sex.
3. Money is love. This pattern can get set up in families with money. When emotional love is not flowing freely, money is often used as a substitute. Mom and Dad's money and possessions represent the energy of the
4. I have to be ill to be loved. If you were given more attention when you were ill as a child, you may still believe that you need this pattern to get noticed. Your sickness may be a way to keep you from living your life fully or from taking responsibility for your life because you feel incapable and afraid. It is something to fall back on when you need to escape and want to hide.
5. I have to suffer to get love. People in abusive relationships are not familiar with healthy love and how it operates in a relationship. If you were physically punished in your childhood, you may believe that love is being hurt. You will even sabotage healthy relationships to create this so that you can feel your familiar experience again.
6. I have to fix people to be loved. Many people have a deeper belief that if they are not helping people to get better, then they have no value. If they have no value, they cannot be lovable. The problem with this pattern is that if you need to fix sick and dysfunctional people in order to feel loveable, you will continually attract these people into your life, and they will not get well. You need them to be "unfixable" so that you can stay "loveable."
7. I have to control you to make it safe to let you love me. Control is one of the biggest patterns in relationships. The deeper belief is that you want to control others before they can control you. It is common for two controllers to be together in a relationship, both only seeing the other in the controlling pattern. At a deeper level, if you still believe that you are a victim, you may use control to create a feeling of safety to prevent yourself from ever being a victim again.
8. I have to please others to be loved. This pattern is the opposite of a controller pattern. It is more common for women to play this role in a relationship with a controlling man. In this pattern the person is always thinking of other people before she thinks of herself. Everything she thinks or says is processed with the underlying thought of what others will think and what others want. Chronic Fatigue and other energy depletion disorders are common with this pattern.
9. If I let you love me, you will leave me. Abandonment is at the core of this pattern. If you were abandoned as a child, you may fear that the people you love get hurt, die, or go away. In order to prevent this from happening, you will not let a relationship go very far, or you will sabotage it first. That way, it doesn't hurt as much, and it is more predictable.
10. Love hurts; relationships are painful. This belief will only support you in creating unhealthy, painful relationships. You will continue to attract people with whom you create a lot of pain. You will support your relationships in being painful in the way you perceive them, think about them, and the choices you make in them. You will go from one relationship to another feeling victimized and hurt, wondering when real love will come your way.

The first step is to understand that your beliefs create your experience. Whatever you believe, either subconsciously or consciously, is what you will get in life. If you don't like what you are getting, change your beliefs. Many of these beliefs are at a subconscious level and are generational beliefs. Limiting beliefs are also rooted in our childhood experiences. You have the opportunity to take control of the phenomenal power of your mind to release these old beliefs and create new ones.

Be willing to end any relationships that cannot be healthy. Hold the following as your motto.

I am worthy of real love. I deserve to be loved and admired by a healthy, loving person. I am attracting people that can and want to create healthy, loving relationships with me. I am ending relationships that cannot be healthy. God loves me, and I love myself.