Last update: Augusts 13, 2016
Let's start with a question: Can you imagine what would happen if emotions could disguise themselves as other emotions? What could happen if negative emotions were able to hide behind positive emotions? Could we face them? Suppose the worst case occurs, that is, one of the worst emotions disguises itself as one of the most beautiful emotions: What if fear took the place of love?
Love understood as romantic love, that "Big Bang" of emotions that explodes between two people and that includes intimacy, commitment, attraction, passion. A phenomenon that involves up to the last cell of our body, which affects our mind, our emotions and even our tastes and preferences.
How can fear hide behind such a beautiful emotion? Imagine living in love and fear. Isn't love a gesture of courage and generosity towards the other person and ourselves? Maybe we need to cut the bull's head and clarify what it means that "fear disguises itself". Let's try to put it another way: what if the cause of love were nothing but fear?
When fear peeps
First, let's ask the million dollar question: Why are we afraid? We must be honest: this emotion has been with us since the dawn of time and is what allows us to flee or to fight and, therefore, to survive. Faced with an emotional event as perturbing as love, it is normal for fear to be activated in us, to warn us that this change could bring something negative.
The usefulness that fear had in the past has disappeared precisely because it is activated very easily. Today we respond disproportionately to incidents that do not represent real threats. In other words, we label situations that could do us good as “threats”.
Fear ceases to be useful when it blocks us, preventing us from having fun, suffering or simply living. Past stories of abandonment, drastic breakdowns, pain and suffering leave marks in us that condition our way of conceiving and receiving love. We turn into "compulsive cowards" in love, we try to escape from the suffering that characterized the previous relationship or from the pain that comes from loneliness and not feeling loved.
The disguises of fear
If fear is activated so easily and love is able to activate it due to previous heart problems, how does it manifest in practice? Let's see some examples.
- The "search for love". In essence, the favorite disguise of fear is loneliness. A fear due to those stereotypes that make the idea that being alone is terrible penetrate our minds. This fear acquires a certain weight when, conscious or not, it pushes us to compulsively seek a partner to avoid a terrible fate. If we try to control our love, its recipient, its development and its explosion, we run a great risk.
- The doubt. Let's say love knocked on our door and we opened it. However, a shadow lurks in our mind under one of its favorite shapes… “Is the time really right? Am I not rushing things too far? Is that what I really want? ”. In this case, it is the fear of lack of love that makes itself felt. We know how much we have suffered and these doubts are the pulsing emotional scars of the past in new guises.
- The exasperated perfectionism. It is that situation in which we feel the urgency and the absolute need to please the partner, even going so far as to change our personality, all with the aim of making everything go well. At the very thought of being abandoned again, we feel the world collapsing on us. This is the fear linked to the most human part of us: the fear of loss, of the threat that a vital presence for us will be taken away from us. This fear will triumph if we allow it to infect our partner.
Accept or fight?
At this point, the logical question we ask ourselves is: are we alone in the face of danger? Absolutely no. However, before starting to think about fear or love, we must be aware of our humanity, of our need for love and our human fears. We must understand that fear will always be there and that it is up to us to accept it and choose love.
Then there is another thing that is inseparable from life and the human condition: time. Bringing out the time factor may seem obvious, but it's still very important. Time and its healing powers affect us more than we imagine; they help us to observe the episodes that have given us the fears that are gripping us today from another perspective.
To conclude, we are us, with our individuality, lessons learned and personal wisdom. And above all it is us with our infinite capacity to love and our unstoppable desire to be loved, accepted and appreciated.
The love we have felt, despite all that it may imply, gives us the extraordinary ability to start loving again. What could be better than not exposing ourselves to this loneliness, these doubts and these losses, and then choosing to return to love? Certainly, in this way we will be the ones to suffocate the fears with our love, and not vice versa.
