For a long time, I think I carried a deep belief.

It comes from childhood.

The belief is that love may ask of you to walk on eggshells, to make sure the other is okay. It’s like caretaking for their emotional needs while you at least partly disregard yours.

In fact, during childhood, there may be no other way than this. You depend on the adults around you for basic needs, love, attention…life. So you feel that you have to make sure the atmosphere in the home doesn’t get crazy, that they won’t start to blame you or punish you.

So, slowly, even without realizing it, you start to do what they want you to do to keep the peace so that it doesn’t get bad.

This is prominent when living is shared. When people live separately, whether it be with parents or partners, the pressure to remain within a certain area of control decreases, with geographical distance. Sometimes, one even feels it as they exit the space, the house where control is taking place. A tension, a hypervigilance leaves the body. It’s like a breath of fresh air. Something eases, something calms down. The self can be, expand, freely. Dance maybe.

I have noticed how deep this pattern may run, within me too.

Love as a reward for behaving well.

Love given for being a good girl.

Love given as one is polite, graceful, not difficult.

Love as a reward for not changing the rules that are already in place—love as a reward for fitting in, inserting oneself, softly.

Love as a reward for being cute.

It seems obvious now, after the past years, and all the inner conversations, that love should love us fully—not only when we did the good thing.

Otherwise, somewhere, deep down, love comes from fear.

One does the thing they know will be able to keep love in.

And I believe that one may flow from one space where somebody controls them for love, to another space where somebody else controls them for love, to another.

“Join my life and I will love you.”

“Live according to my own terms, and I will protect you.”

“You are welcome here only if you respect the energetic framework I have drawn.”

I believe, now, that one may flow from one of these spaces to another space of that same kind if the pattern is not brought to awareness.

And for this, I believe one has to find a way to live according to their own terms first, “free” from any energy that would create entanglements, arrangements, with their spirit in the name of support or of love.

From that space of sovereignty, where one is not trying to escape from one space of control in exchange of almost any other appealing, seemingly aligned thing, they can receive true love.

From that space of loving themselves enough to remove themselves from all the spaces that are codependent, or unhealthy “arrangements,” one can receive organic, fluid love.

Because now, they are already free.

They are not trying to escape any other thing.

But these energies of accepting control also come from within—it’s thinking that outside of such spaces, love may not exist.

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