When You Open Your Heart, You Start To Heal

“When You Open Your Heart, You Start To Heal”, I really cannot remember where I got this from, but I believe it.

Side note: Honestly, I hope my love interest doesn’t read this, lol I’m shy.

I have relationship anxiety, and I know I am not the only one.

How can you be anxious about love or being in a relationship?

Hmmm

Well, I know people don’t just wake up one morning and develop relationship anxiety, their past experiences may have caused them to.

And now we are here.

Anxiety is one of the things I don’t like to feel, it can be crippling. And this time, I could feel my whole body tremble.

My heart racing, with a burn sensation, then that occasional sink in your belly, overwhelmed with not-so-helpful thoughts. That was me.

I felt the same way about my finances too, but this one has to do with my heart opening more.

Healing is hard, just shoving it down and trying to forget plus pretending that it didn’t happen sure sounds like the best option short term.

Short term because, it won’t last forever, you’ll just find yourself playing games, trying not to feel anything. Punishing yourself.

And for me, I want to feel everything. So yeah, I am anxious.

I was aware enough to know why I was feeling the way I felt.

I knew it was because I once believed someone who said they loved me and went ahead to treat me like I was dumb, and didn’t matter.

I also knew it was because I once believed someone that said they loved me and all of a sudden, they didn’t think we needed to talk every day anymore, and something about distance.

“I was scared that when people say they love me, one day they will look at me with so much hate I wouldn’t be able to forget. Not because I did anything, but just because it is what it is”.

I still haven’t forgotten, some things can traumatize you and cause you to develop a trauma response.

When you are young with not much experience with love, situations like this can mess you up. You’ll never want to trust anyone or let them in, and even if you let them into your space, it could take a while or you could never let them into your heart because you are scared of getting hurt or heartbroken again

We are all scared, maybe you are not, but I am. But being scared is not the problem. The problem is letting it direct your actions and your decision.

I don’t want to live like that, so, I am healing my heart.

Opening up to genuinely express love to someone will reach into those places you have shut off for a while.

It will trigger those events you haven’t healed from.

You love them, but you’ll read meanings into what they say or do, “Are they being honest?”, “Are they trying to play games with me?”, “Do they really love me like they say?”.

If you pay attention, you’ll realize this is your past, this is you not trusting yourself, this is you not thinking you are worthy of love or that you are enough.

And that’s you still dealing with a little resentment towards yourself.

These are some of the stories we may come up with, but they are not facts.

We can’t go back to change things, and we can’t say why the other person did what they did to hurt us to the extent we didn’t want to feel anymore.

But we can be here, we can choose to stop letting the past hover around us. And prevent us from experiencing one of the most amazing energies in the universe.

We can choose to accept everything that happened.

We can choose to not let it control our lives by forgiving ourselves.

We may be upset at the people that hurt us, but when we search deep down, we are more upset that we let it happen.

So maybe it’s time to show ourselves a little kindness and stop punishing ourselves.

It’s time to love and be loved.

It’s time to open your heart.

It’s time.

“Sometimes it takes a heartbreak to shake us awake and help us see we are worth so much more than we’re settling for.” 

– Mandy Hale

Featured Image:

Photo by Darius Bashar on Unsplash