Why Our Need to Be Loved Is A Longing for Home

Listen above or tune in on Apple Podcasts or Podbean

EPISODE 84 – PODCAST TRANSCRIPT

Hi there, welcome back to Kelly Martin Speaks. I’m your host Kelly Martin and this is episode 84.

This week I am going to talk about love, because this podcast is going out the week of Valentine’s Day and as someone who is single and who has had my fair share of loss and grief over relationships, I felt it was important to talk about the true meaning of love, especially when in relationships and how the absence of the relationship can be so heartbreaking, but equally holds within it the essence of true love that we can discover if we move through the grief of loss in our own way and recognise what it is in the significant ‘other’ that we miss and long for.

Now this is not just for single people; it can be for people who are in a relationship that may be difficult; it can be for people who are in a family relationship that is challenging or in a friendship too. It doesn’t matter the package the relationship comes in, only that the desire for love is the key theme here.

This past week has been quite challenging for me, some of which I can’t go into too much detail about, but I realised something while hugging my best friend Michael (who has been my partner, romantically speaking in the past). And due to his health issues and age I have been feeling such fear, as some of you may know, about losing him.

As I hugged him, I wondered, what was it that I felt I was worried about losing? What was the feeling in my heart that felt a yearning, also a sorrowful feeling that did not want to let go of him? And I realised it was a feeling of home.

When I say home, I don’t mean a house with a roof on it, but a sense of belonging, a sense of acceptance, a sense of comfort and care. His energy reminded me of something so deep, so primal within me that I realised I can’t keep looking to others for this feeling. I must now find this feeling within me.

Relationships, in all their forms, are great mirrors. What we are looking for or seeing in the ‘other’ is what we yearn to see or perhaps remember inside our own nature, our own being.

This Divine Discontent

I think most of us, if we are honest, have this sense of inner discontent. We don’t quite know what it is that we feel is missing, but we do know this yearning for ‘something’ that we can’t quite grab a hold of.

We may try and fill this sense of discontent by getting into relationship with someone or even filling that space with activity, anything from over-working to over-eating. Most addictions being a desire for this thing or feeling that the place of discontent resides in.

I think after a while of self-exploration, be it on the spiritual journey, the mental health journey or simply a healing journey for whatever reason, we come to a place in our lives when we know that what is ‘out there’ is never going to fill this overwhelming desire for oneness, desire for belonging, desire for love. This desire is a sign that the heart is waking up to something deeper, deeper than superficial human love, something that reminds us all of the place we came from before we entered this human body. You can call it God, the Universe, the Divine, Life… whatever fits your understanding, but most of us want this on some level, even if we don’t realise it. We want this.

When we are attached to other things to satiate this desire such as our lover, our job, our status, even our body, we miss the calling of our heart desiring ‘more’.

The feeling of discontent with ‘what is’ is the beginning, to see that what we have may not be satisfying us on a deeper level. We then need to be with this feeling, not fight it, not try to get rid of it, to allow it to take us deeper into our awakening process.

We may no longer be satisfied with mere morsels at the dining table of life. Viewing mountaintops via movies on our televisions, we may no longer find shallow conversations or the status quo nearly as alluring anymore. We are wanting to break convention and move away from the known, the certain, and into the true adventure of life. We yearn for the spontaneity of the new, the uncertain, the unknown. Life is meant to be sometimes chaotic, sometimes peaceful, definitely alive and many of us have settled for comfort and what we think is ‘forever’ while not acknowledging the shifting carpet that life truly is.

That ‘home’ we see or feel in another may no longer satisfy us, but the opposite may feel too scary, too overwhelming to move into, so we need to dance in the great divide, to allow ourselves to feel shaky for a while, to let life drive us instead of us trying to drive life.

As Bruce Lipton says:

“We are spiritual beings who need love as much as we need food…Survival of the Most Loving is the only ethic that will ensure not only a healthy personal life but also a healthy planet”

But love when in relationships can be tricky.

How Our Parents Way Of Loving Leaves An Imprint

When we were born, hopefully we experienced love. Some of us may not have and that can cause us challenges in relationships until we question our upbringing and learn to reparent who we are.

How we experienced love as children leaves an imprint and that imprint influences how we experience love. We may believe that love is having someone who is always there on our life journey, someone who sticks around, who is there through the hard times and the good times and this is a way to show love, but if we want to go one step further, we need to see love as more flexible, that when we are in a relationship with another, that sometimes that love is there and sometimes that love is not and that is okay.

It is okay because once we have tapped into the unending love that is inside of us, that deeper soul love, then whatever relationship we have with another whether it comes or goes will not negatively impact our essential nature.

And how our parents loved us can really impact how we love and how we allow ourselves to be loved back.

My parents loved in the only way they knew how. My father loved through his presence. I always felt this deep acceptance from him (until my teenage years when my transition into womanhood was problematic for him). He was not a big talker, but he was a good listener and I always felt that sense of ‘home’ with my dad. He offered this unconditional love and always seemed to get me. My mother’s love has been rather different, more conditional, based on what I can offer and give her, in terms of time, attention and friendship. My mum, when I was a teenager, in answer to my issues with friends would often say, ‘Don’t worry about them, I’ll be your friend’, which is not exactly what a teenager needs to hear as many a young woman will get, I think.

So, I carried this feeling that to be loved I had to please others and lost myself in the process.

Because of my understanding of what I thought love was as a child I carried this into my relationships, both romantic and friendships too. I was always looking for the unconditionally accepting man, expecting him to be there for me, like my father was for my mother, even if I was demanding and self-absorbed. I was looking for that loving acceptance of home in those men I had a relationship with, because I found females were more conditional and less loving (in my eyes) because I viewed them through my mother’s way of loving me. In my past I was a demanding partner, expecting perfection from my partner, yet not accepting my own imperfections at all.

Others may have had parenting that involved a mother or father who ‘loved’ you so much that it became more controlling and domineering and so you may look for that type of person and dynamic on any future relationships.

So basically, an unquestioned past can mean our future relationships continue a particular pattern of ‘conditional’ or sometimes even ‘toxic’ love.

If your parents were controlling and possessive, you may misinterpret a controlling or possessive partner as loving you and until you question this you may marry or date narcissists and gas-lighters until you stop in your tracks and see the reality of what is truly happening.

This is where it is important to understand what love really is and to see if we are looking for love in all the wrong places.

Sometimes people give us gifts and money as their form of love early on in life and when we go into a relationship we may refuse to give to that other person, until they have given to us first. We learn to become the manipulator instead. It is only through asking what love is, what we have lost or think we have lost in a relationship, that we can then dig deep and discover what real love is.

When we are single is the perfect time to go on a love quest. To find out what our true needs are and where perhaps our definitions of love from the past may have impacted our previous relationships. If we can truly understand this and go within to discover the love we have been seeking from others, we may then go into the next relationship in a whole new way.

But we must be prepared to be triggered and instead of reacting in the same old ways, to find new ways of seeing what the relationship is highlighting to us. Where are we not feeling loved? Where are you not loving? And why? What is stopping us, and can we be with the periods in our new relationships when it feels that love outside is not there and then go within to the deep well of love inside our own heart?

Thanks for listening to this episode of Kelly Martin Speaks

If you have a question or topic you are struggling with and would like me to answer on an upcoming podcast episode, please get in touch. Your name will be confidential. EMAIL me at kellymartinspeaks@gmail.com or message me on Facebook via my page Kelly Martin Speaks.

And don’t forget, if you feel that others are passing you by and ‘The Not Good Enough’ voice is screaming loudly, pop by kellymartin.uk to find out all about my books, including Book 1 ‘When Everyone Shines but You’

You can also support my channel via my podcast page on my website kellymartinspeaks.co.uk via Paypal or buy me a coffee via ko-fi.

Until next time…bye for now

Donate To Kelly’s podcast

Latest Podcast Episodes

• Success and Freedom – What Do They Mean?
• Feeling Disturbed by The State of The World?
• Is It Time To Trust The Plan?
• Are You Hiding Your Brightness?
• Is it Time to Drink in the Beauty of the New?