When You Realize You’ve Been Loving the Wrong Way

At one point in life, you find yourself at an unexpected place when you realize that you actually have not been loving the way you have been doing it. It is not that you did not mean the right things, but you did it in the same patterns. You know you have been putting all your heart in relationships but you have not been putting the same care on yourself. You can see how previous hurt influenced your decisions and how the need to connect to someone clouded your reason at times. This clarity is somewhat heavy, but freeing, as that is the awareness that is the beginning of the change.

Why Falling in Love is Like Falling in the wrong direction.

Being in love out of fear makes you believe that you need to work to win love and not have it flowing. Love based on fear causes you to stretch yourself too thin, accept bad treatment or stifle yourself in the name of keeping someone around. It teaches you that war should be avoided and limits must be blurred to maintain peace. But it is not peace--it is the self-abandonment. As soon as you understand that you have been loving fearfully rather than confidently, you will understand why relationships drained you, rather than filled you.

The Enlightenment Which Is Emotional Honesty to Self.

It is all different when it comes to emotional self-honesty. Your power gets restored when you confess to the patterns that hurt you. You start perceiving that the incorrect form of affection was not a weakness in your personality, but it was a habit developed due to very simple survival. Perhaps you have learned how to love by taking care, being nice, or over-giving since you used to feel safe doing it. However, now, you are restricted by those patterns. This wake-up call shows how much you need to be loved back, respected, and get emotional comfort. And now you start overwriting your love.

When You Find the Difference between Giving and Over-Giving.

The inclination towards over-giving is one of the largest indications that you have been loving wrongly. Generosity is a part of healthy love and excessive giving is a result of fear, security or unfulfilled emotional needs. You might have thought that the more you gave, the more you could be liked. Rather, excessive giving tended to bring about the lack of balance, resentment, and emotional burnout. Being aware of this distinction is one way of making a transition to healthier relationship. You are taught how to give without losing yourself, love without losing your emotional well-being. This shift is a change in relationships to partnerships and not unilateral efforts.

One more revelation is when you realize that love does not have to be a test to you all the time. You might be compelled to establish yourself again and again when you have been loving the wrong way. You struggle much to keep one person interested or approved, but you forget that true love does not involve acting. Relationships that are healthy are ones that accept your true self. Love is less burdensome, less endangered and truer when you cease proving and begin to be. This fact frees you of perfection in the emotional sense.

It is critical in this transformation that understanding boundaries becomes necessary. There are a lot of individuals fond of the wrong way finding it difficult to set or respect boundaries. You might think that boundaries drive people away but on the contrary, it brings the right people closer. Boundaries guard your emotional energy and are a guarantee of respect to each other. They enable love to exist without hatred or dependence. Your relationships start to change when you get to know that boundaries are not barriers but bridges. Connection is made to feel equal and emotionally sound.

Old pattern healing makes you realize that you didn't love the wrong way on purpose, you did it like you do. Maybe you accepted emotional suppression, conflict avoidance, or people-pleasing patterns in which case they used to protect you. Now, they are restricting your rights to deep and safe love. Once you begin to heal these habits are replaced with self-knowledge, emotional outburst and healthier communication. This development will enable you to love in a clear and open-minded way and not in a confused and fearful way.

It is also at this point that you start to appreciate the need to be loved. Those who are wrongly in love have difficulties in their ability to feel deserving of love. You have concentrated so much on giving and forgot how to receive. Healthy love is a compromise of the two. You feel that when you are able to permit yourself to be taken care of, supported, and understood, you feel a connection at a far more deep level. Love may be given with no guilt or suspicion and it becomes one of the most effective forms of emotional maturity.

When you cease to mix intensity with love, there is a big change. Loving wrongly will most likely mean confusing emotional highs and lows with passion. But passion is no intimacy--it is instability. True love is more stable, relaxed and more rooted. It builds up and not oppresses. Once you give up intensity and turn to emotional security you feel a kind of love that seems to be lasting and restorative. This awareness is a turning point in your relationships and your self development.

This change also teaches how to communicate in a truthful and not suppositional way. Once you have been loving wrong, you may not want to express a need in line with fear of rejection. However, it is only by brushing off your need that you get to the misunderstandings and dissatisfaction. Positive communication develops emotional closeness, and it generates mutual understanding. When you are taught to speak frankly, disagreement becomes easy and bondage becomes better. Communication is turned into a means of collaboration and not a danger to unity.

You also start being emotionally responsible. Loving the wrong way at times involves over-blaming yourself or completely blaming others. Responsibility is in between. It will be the recognition of your patterns without shame and the identification of the responsibility of your partner without bitterness. Such balance assists you to establish maturity-based and respect-based relationships. Accountability leads to growth, affiliation, and emotional sanity, which are components that constitute loving the right way.

The other radical change is when you completely redefine the feeling of love. You release the old-fashioned ideas, which explained to you that love has to be tough, dramatic, or sacrificing. Rather you start to appreciate a reciprocal, stable and emotionally sustaining love. You know that love is supposed to give you strength and not take away strength. This new definition is a kind of a light, it will guide you to pick the relationships that meet your emotional needs and future happiness.

Learning to love yourself differently perhaps is the most significant change. When you know you have been loving people wrongly, you repeatedly find that you have been loving yourself wrongly. You might have neglected your needs, lowered your voice or taken less than you could have gotten. Rediscovering the love in yourself makes the relationships healthier. It teaches you to love yourself, to keep your peace, to find love that reflects the respect you accord yourself.

Final Thoughts

Coming to understand that you have been loving the wrong way is not a failure it is a stepping forward. It shows how well you are able to grow, emotionally conscious, and healthier related. Once you become aware of the unhealthy patterns, you will be empowered to substitute them with conscious, safe and reciprocal love. This change alters all your relationships that you get into, including relationships you have with yourself. The process of loving the right way starts with making awareness choices, mending old wounds, and adopting a new way of appearing. Once you learn to love in a different way, then you end up experiencing the type of relationship your heart has always needed.